Full Disclosure: I've used nightly Mozilla builds regularly since M11, and now use Mozilla nightlies more often than any other browser.
"Well, that's a cute common argument, but the fact is that the editor is almost free."
This particular argument, frankly, is crap. Have a look at tinderbox or the weekly status reports - and count how many of the fixes are specifically for the composer system.
There is a big, big difference between an HTML editor, and supporting form controls. This was a big mistake that Mozilla made, and they have been trying to get out of recently by decoupling the forms controls from the composer (I believe the code-name for this project is "Ender Lite"). The main "crossover" for the composer is in the mail/news system, and the creation of HTML "enhanced" emails.
Composer is the one part of Mozilla that I don't think should be there. Then again, I'm one of the increasingly small number of people who think that HTML in mail and news is obscene.
Charles Miller
(Whose last five Mozilla posts were rabidly positive, but you have to draw the line somewhere.)
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Lack of communication.
on
Death March
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· Score: 4
Death March is not the "only way to get a project done". This is a myth that's been happily supported by generations of IT managers who know that if you prod a hacker the right way, his pride will make him do all sorts of insane (usually unpaid) overtime. It's a myth supported by hackers who don't dare go to management and say "Our estimates were wrong. It'll never ship in time."
The Death March saps the energy of programmers. It increases the burn-out rate. It severely decreases the quality of the code. If the project survives, it's always because one or two "hero programmers" work their asses off writing untested spaghetti code that barely pushes the project into usefulness, not too far behind the deadline.
And we wonder why the software industry has such a wonderful reputation for quality.
There is a better approach, but it involves communication, something hackers can sometimes be bad at. You just have to learn how to push back. Start off with a good estimate. Make sure management knows it's only an estimate, and may change later. Drill this fact into them as a way of life, but at the same time, be _very_ inflexible that your estimate is the very best you can come up with at the moment, you're not going to chop a week off it just to fit in with a trade show.
If you're given an unreasonable demand, tell management it's unreasonable. If you think a job is going to take six months, say it'll take six months. Don't say three, and plan on overtime. Oh, and you're not Scotty. Don't say nine months, because next project, you'll have moved on, and _I_ will be left with a manager who expects miracles.
Keep track of how the project is going. Be as accurate as possible. Use some measurable criteria, don't just go around asking "how's it going?" Recently, one of the projects I'm working on slipped due to various problems - some our fault, some beyond our control. Because we'd laid the groundwork early, and because we were keeping close track of our progress, we could go to the project manager and say "Look, we're behind schedule. The new estimated shipping date is 'x'. This project won't sustain any more programmers, so if you want to ship earlier, you'll have to take out some functionality.
Phrase it like that, and you'll be amazed how reasonable people can be.
If you tell your project manager that you're behind schedule, and his response is "Work overtime", then go out the door and keep walking. This is the reason I left my last job, and I've never been happier as a result.
The result of avoiding death marches? Programmers are happy because there are fewer unreasonable demands. Management are happy because they feel they have control over the situation, and they don't get that feeling of palpable dread every time they go back into the cubicles and find everyone looking through job ads.
Header files. It's very hard to have an overview of what a Java class can do, since there's no list of methods.
That's just bogus. If the information you want can be cleanly generated from the source, why maintain parallel files saying the same thing?
To get an overview of what a Java class does, generate the Javadoc. That's what it's there for. Even if you haven't bothered to write javadoc comments, you'll get a list of methods and fields for each object. To get a list of methods without generating javadoc, use any semi-decent IDE.
Use a semi-decent IDE anyway. It's amazing how much more productive you can become with the right tools. I particularly enjoy stepping through a program, changing the source from within the debugger, and have it integrate my change directly into the still-running code.
Java classes can only extend one superclass. If you happen to have a whole hierarchy of classes, and only one of the most specialised is to be an 'Observable' as well - bad luck.
As a general rule, if your idea for a class name ends in -able, then you're probably thinking of something better off embodied in an interface.
I've only ever been in very rare cases where I really wanted to use multiple inheritance. Most of the time, instead, I found that when I refactored my code so that it would work with single-inheritance and interfaces, it ended up being far more elegant.
On the other hand, there's no excuse whatsoever for Java's designers having left out enumerated types.
An Everquest game item has exactly the same existance in 'reality' as a software license. People buy them for the same reason people are willing to put money down for the game itself.
Both represent a certain amount of special knowledge and consumed resources that the seller is willing to invest, and that the buyer is not. The seller passes the value of that knowledge and resources to the buyer, and the buyer pays for it.
And if you don't understand why people buy them, that's OK. I certainly wouldn't myself. But there are people out there who buy all sorts of weird shit. Spice Girls CDs. Those annoying two-wheel scooters. They are willing to pay because they get enjoyment out of these things.
And what's so "REAL" about money anyway? If you think about it, money is an illusion too - it's a totally artificial construct of our economic system that we use to represent value in the abstract. Most of the time we trade in money these days, we don't pass anything physical. We swipe a card, and a couple of bits get flipped in one electronic bank account, and a corresponding number are flipped in another.
Okay. Things to do when I get home - write a patch for slashcode that allows people to edit their own posts (provided they have no follow-ups or moderation).
There has always been massive duplication in amateur software development for personal computers. This isn't some magical new phenomenon of Open Source / Free Software. I can remember the huge redundancy of apps as far back as when I used to get those "fish" shareware collections (or whatever they were called) for my Amiga. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. Why?
<p><em>It gives people a place to learn.</em>
<p>Very few coders could walk into a room and immediately start making a difference on a program as complicated as Apache, or emacs. People will always reinvent the wheel, because it's often only by reinventing the wheel that you can teach yourself how wheels work. <em>Then</em> you'll be able to contribute to the super-wheel project.
<p>In the past, these tiny projects would be not released, or end up on an obscure website, or on a shareware disk. Now, they end up on sourceforge. No big deal.
<p><em>We can never predict what will be the Next Big Thing.</em>
<p>Bob's Editor #179 is just another text editor. Cool. And Linux was just another Unix clone. Bring 'em on, and let natural selection sort them out. Those that are well designed, well managed, and fulfil a real need will be adopted.
<p>There seems to be this myth that programming talent is this finite response, and because Bob is working on project A, that means that project B is missing a developer. (You hear this argument a lot about people writing add-ons for Mozilla, for example.) The truth is that while project B might really do with Bob's eyeballs, there's only a small number of "high involvement" developers that a project can stand before it gets top-heavy and falls over. So Bob isn't really going to waste. And who knows, if he learns something cool writing his own editor, his eyeballs will be useful the next time he upgrades his copy of GnomeNotepad++ and finds an annoying bug in it. --
USB, FireWire, and Jini promised us modular things, and besides VCR/TV and Stereos, we don't have much modularity. I would like to see a big name come up with a whole line of designer, modular, entertainment devices. Paint 'em red white and blue or something to get us to like them! Hell I don't know.
The current big-company-supported initiative for modular devices is HAVi. It's focused on Audio/Visual stuff, mainly the control of a/v appliances, and the transfer of content between them. (So yes, it's mainly VCR's, TVs and stereos, but there's provision for other devices too).
It's APIs are a primarily C++ with future plans to make it more Java-ised. I'd personally prefer Jini, but even if Sun were't being COMPLETE SMEGGING IDIOTS about Jini licensing terms, it'd still be years before we could affordably give our telephones enough computing power to run a Java Virtual Machine.
Charles Miller --
Re:Women - tactics and strategy
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Trigger Happy
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· Score: 2
As a counter-example, a female friend of mine recently vanished from the face of the earth for two months. I discovered that the reason for this was that she was spending most of her waking hours on Ultima Online.
I also spend a lot of time playing StarCraft with a (different) woman. She's finished both the game and the expansion pack in single-player mode, something I never bothered with since I prefer multi-player. Similarly, she finished FFVII, when I only got about 25 hours into it, and even helped her son get through Pokemon.
I expect that it was moderated as a troll because there's no moderation option for "One-line comment pounded out as fast as possible in order to be the first post."
Saying "Anyone can start their own Microsoft" is just like saying "Any US citizen can become president." In theory it's true, but in practice, it's laughable.
In one hundred years time, people will look back on the 20th/21st century obsession with letting corporations do whatever the hell they want in the same way as we now look back on the "Divine Right of Kings".
They'll wonder why the hell people who are so willing to put immense restrictions (e.g. the US Constitution) on an elected government would be so religiously opposed to putting restrictions on un-elected businesses, who often have/more/ influence over our daily lives, and certainly have a huge influence over who sits in government.
"BrowseX starts out with most of the mainstream features of Netscape, but without the fat. What you will not see are things like Java(script), DOM, CSS, or XML"
Be still my beating heart.
Just what I've always wanted - a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended, and the other half not work at all. Sure, having a browser written in tcl has some degree of geek-cool, but in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
The reason that you can't work out who said it, is because it's a misquote. The well-known sentence is actually "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
I have no idea where you got the "please" part of it from. I think that the original quote comes from P.T. Barnum, but I couldn't be sure.
A slightly drunken Charles Miller --
"/. has seen many articles about all the/stuff/ that gets thrown into Mozilla because it's "k3wl." Is there any information on a Mozilla feature freeze? I don't see any on the site..."
The only two things that I can think of that qualify as "k3wl features" are the redesigned skins (classic and modern) that were a response to the constant complaints that the interface was ugly, and BiDi support, which has been planned for quite a while, but hasn't landed yet.
There are a number of third-party applications that have been written using Mozilla as a base, such as Chatzilla, but blaming these applications on Mozilla developers is like saying that Linux 2.4 is late because too many people are working on KDE.
I'd also like to add my voice to that of the teeming throng - I use Mozilla as my primary browser on Windows (work) and Linux (home), I usually update to the latest nightly once a week, although I update more often if the nightly is having problems. I don't find it noticeably slow compared to the alternatives. I really don't notice anything wrong with its day-to-day running except a bit of slowness with <TEXTAREA> boxes, and the occasional need to switch back to another browser when I need SSL (I'm too lazy to keep up with PSM).
The Mozilla-favoured translation service doesn't do much better:
But new wheels do not run immediately so approximately, as the customer would have that gladly. They are more largely, still another little angular - however they turn more rapidly.
Is it too much trouble to flip a god damn switch!? Who are the geniuses that think these things up?
This is how that thing called 'progress' works. Someone comes up with a cool new technology. People come up with hundreds of nifty new gadgets and applications for that technology. Those gadgets and applications that people want to use become household items. Those gadgets that people don't want to use show up in fifty years time as jokes in TV shows.
Go back and look at all the stupid ideas people had when they first came up with that "electricity" thing. Think of the wacky ideas people had about how radio and television could be used. Think of the fact that only about one in twenty high-tech startups survive.
The trick, however, is that it's nearly impossible to tell before the fact which gadgets will be wanted, and which will not. Some things that are really good ideas will tank because it was released in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some things that we all think are stupid will turn into the next big craze in consumer electronics. So the only logical thing to do is to produce all of them, and let Darwin sort them out.
We prosper as a society when we allow people to think as wildly as possible, give them enough rope^H^H^Hesources to try their ideas out, take the best, and let the rest drop out.
Going off on a tangent here -- I'm pretty sure that SashXP has nothing to do with active desktop, I'd love to have a Gecko-enabled root window in X, it'd mean I could get rid of a lot of the other annoying things I put up with for the sake of there being nothing else available.
Replacing desktop icons with links would make my day. The icon system in gmc is an ugly kludge. It'd be great to be able to code functionality directly into the root window using simple tools like HTML, Javascript and style-sheets. A couple of tricks with mouse-overs and layers, and you could do write your own application launch menus. A basic <EMBED> API, and you've got yourself a way to swallow apps into the root window in the way we normally do with docks or panels.
With ten minutes, and without having to learn some obscure C++ API, I could write a little bit of code that popped up the current slashdot headlines when I clicked on an image on my desktop.
"I'm not saying IBM's mistake is focusing the platform on geeks. I'm saying IBM's mistake is focusing on geeks, period. They're using Linux as the evagelization tool of choice to attract geeks."
IBM's core business is selling hardware. IBM only ever started selling software to avoid being accused of bundling during its antitrust days. Think about it - it's sure be easier for IBM if Linux was mature enough that they didn't have to maintain AIX any more.
I don't see IBM throwing Linux at the desktop market. Sure, they're making the occasional press-release that only gets mentioned on slashdot, and they're doing nifty research projects with it, but they're no more positioning Linux as a desktop OS than they are AIX. Look at the ports they've actually done for Linux - Websphere, DB2, Linux for OS/390 and Domino Server. They've ported the Domino server, but not the Notes client. Server, not desktop.
Yes, having Linux run on your Really Big Servers (and really small watches) attracts geeks. If you attract combine giving geeks what they want (Linux compatibility) with giving suits what they want (big-company supplier), you sell hardware. But I don't see how this is harming Linux at all.
Linux can go under in the sense that the recent Linux craze can crash and turn to be a fad. And it will.
I remember when they said this about the Internet. "Oh, it's just like CB radio. In a few years the fad will be over and only the geeks will be left." Maybe we need an "Imminent Death of Linux Predicted, Film at 11!" meme?
IBM are really running a rearguard action here. There are already two good open-source Java server apps out there, Jakarta and Enhydra, and the currently available ones are significantly ahead of IBM's basic offering in terms of supporting the most recent versions of standards.
If IBM released the EJB container, on the other hand, that'd be cool. There isn't a halfway-decent free-as-in-liberty EJB implementation that I know of.
I work with Websphere Advanced Edition for my day-job and really like it, but I don't think I'd bother with the standard edition even if it were open-source - there's already enough code out there, and Websphere isn't particularly friendly to install or configure on *nix.
On the other hand, IBM have been really good lately about releasing Java stuff to the open-source community. The XML/XSLT packages that they donated to the Apache project are pretty damn funky, for example. --
It's a rather interesting insight into how badly IBM has done it's database marketing that whenever your 'quasi-technical man in the street' lists databases, noone seems to remember db2.
Charles Miller --
"It is so much easier to tell the time accurately on a digital wristwatch, anybody who uses an analog watch is using it simply because of the way it looks and because it's supposedly more "serious" or "mature" to wear an analog watch."
It is very rare that anyone needs to tell the time accurately. Most of the time, you're just interested in the nearest 10/15/30 minutes. The great thing about an analog watch is that you rarely have to parse the entire thing - you just have to get a general idea of where the hands are, and after a while of wearing one, you intuit the rest.
With analog watches, it's also easier to figure out (generally, again) intervals, since you can skip the arithmetic, all you're doing is pattern-matching different locations of hands. Analog watches are also easier to read in low-light conditions, since being able to see the general placement of hands is significantly easier than trying to discern the difference between digital 0 and 8 in the dark. Analog watches are generally less bulky than digital watches, and more likely to survive if water leaks in.
It's all a question of comfort, certainly not productivity. This is why I wear analog watches. Some people may process information differently to me, and prefer digital watches. More power to them.
Admittedly it's not hard to tell the time on an analog watch, but those few milliseconds more it takes, multiplied by the thousands of times you look at your watch, is a significant productivity hit.
This is a fallacious argument, because it assumes that the extra milliseconds are cumulative time taken away from productive work. If you look at your watch while wandering down the street, you've lost nothing. Even while you're working, you're constantly task switching between productive and un-productive thoughts, so a few milliseconds extra to look at a watch is just part of that the noise.
I've only used Debian indirectly, it's never run on any of my personal boxes (because I'm too lazy), but I really appreciated the idea of having dependancies based on roles, rather than a particular version of a particular program. For example, you can specify that your software "requires a mail transport agent", rather than specifying "requires sendmail".
Debian also got a lot of things right by specifying up-front a standard for package naming. I'm sick of all of my dependancies breaking because I dared to install a non-RedHat RPM. --
"I am in no way a microsoft fan but I'm afraid microsoft has it right with Explorer. You click on My Computer, it opens up instantly, no bloat. You want to use the web, type a web address, THEN it loads up web components."
The reason that My Computer opens instantly is not that there is "no bloat". it is because the bloat has already been pre-loaded when you started up Windows. It's been made sure that the Windows Explorer code is sitting in memory right where it can be accessed most efficiently. Similarly, when you want to use the web, a lot of the web components are already in memory, which is why IE starts up so much faster than any other web browser.
This approach would be possible under Linux, but users would immediately cry foul. "This bloatware uses up xx Meg of RAM before it even _DOES_ anything! I just want to use it for the foo function, I don't want everything else to load as well!"
As for the problems of having to look at every file, this is why we Need A Better Filesystem For Workstations. Windows hacks its way around the requirement for looking at files by trusting a three-letter extension. This can often have really annoying effects (Like trying to work out how to save something from notepad so it _doesn't_ end up named foo.xml.txt) File managers that try this stunt in the Unix world do a terrible job, because file-extensions are not the Unix way. The only files on a Unix system that generally have dot-extensions are graphics and sound files. Finding out what kind of file something is, is what the 'file' command is there for.
What we need, of course, is real filesystem metadata. Being able to stat a file and get (directly from the fs, and therefore efficiently) a file-type magic number, or a MIME Type for the file would make file managers a hell of a lot more efficient. The problem is, the FS writers are busy writing filesystems for _servers_, which don't want to be loaded down with this sort of feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Full Disclosure: I've used nightly Mozilla builds regularly since M11, and now use Mozilla nightlies more often than any other browser.
This particular argument, frankly, is crap. Have a look at tinderbox or the weekly status reports - and count how many of the fixes are specifically for the composer system.
There is a big, big difference between an HTML editor, and supporting form controls. This was a big mistake that Mozilla made, and they have been trying to get out of recently by decoupling the forms controls from the composer (I believe the code-name for this project is "Ender Lite"). The main "crossover" for the composer is in the mail/news system, and the creation of HTML "enhanced" emails.
Composer is the one part of Mozilla that I don't think should be there. Then again, I'm one of the increasingly small number of people who think that HTML in mail and news is obscene.
Charles Miller
(Whose last five Mozilla posts were rabidly positive, but you have to draw the line somewhere.)
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The Death March saps the energy of programmers. It increases the burn-out rate. It severely decreases the quality of the code. If the project survives, it's always because one or two "hero programmers" work their asses off writing untested spaghetti code that barely pushes the project into usefulness, not too far behind the deadline.
And we wonder why the software industry has such a wonderful reputation for quality.
There is a better approach, but it involves communication, something hackers can sometimes be bad at. You just have to learn how to push back. Start off with a good estimate. Make sure management knows it's only an estimate, and may change later. Drill this fact into them as a way of life, but at the same time, be _very_ inflexible that your estimate is the very best you can come up with at the moment, you're not going to chop a week off it just to fit in with a trade show.
If you're given an unreasonable demand, tell management it's unreasonable. If you think a job is going to take six months, say it'll take six months. Don't say three, and plan on overtime. Oh, and you're not Scotty. Don't say nine months, because next project, you'll have moved on, and _I_ will be left with a manager who expects miracles.
Keep track of how the project is going. Be as accurate as possible. Use some measurable criteria, don't just go around asking "how's it going?" Recently, one of the projects I'm working on slipped due to various problems - some our fault, some beyond our control. Because we'd laid the groundwork early, and because we were keeping close track of our progress, we could go to the project manager and say "Look, we're behind schedule. The new estimated shipping date is 'x'. This project won't sustain any more programmers, so if you want to ship earlier, you'll have to take out some functionality.
Phrase it like that, and you'll be amazed how reasonable people can be.
If you tell your project manager that you're behind schedule, and his response is "Work overtime", then go out the door and keep walking. This is the reason I left my last job, and I've never been happier as a result.
The result of avoiding death marches? Programmers are happy because there are fewer unreasonable demands. Management are happy because they feel they have control over the situation, and they don't get that feeling of palpable dread every time they go back into the cubicles and find everyone looking through job ads.
Charles Miller
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That's just bogus. If the information you want can be cleanly generated from the source, why maintain parallel files saying the same thing?
To get an overview of what a Java class does, generate the Javadoc. That's what it's there for. Even if you haven't bothered to write javadoc comments, you'll get a list of methods and fields for each object. To get a list of methods without generating javadoc, use any semi-decent IDE.
Use a semi-decent IDE anyway. It's amazing how much more productive you can become with the right tools. I particularly enjoy stepping through a program, changing the source from within the debugger, and have it integrate my change directly into the still-running code.
As a general rule, if your idea for a class name ends in -able, then you're probably thinking of something better off embodied in an interface.
I've only ever been in very rare cases where I really wanted to use multiple inheritance. Most of the time, instead, I found that when I refactored my code so that it would work with single-inheritance and interfaces, it ended up being far more elegant.
On the other hand, there's no excuse whatsoever for Java's designers having left out enumerated types.
Charles Miller
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An Everquest game item has exactly the same existance in 'reality' as a software license. People buy them for the same reason people are willing to put money down for the game itself.
Both represent a certain amount of special knowledge and consumed resources that the seller is willing to invest, and that the buyer is not. The seller passes the value of that knowledge and resources to the buyer, and the buyer pays for it.
And if you don't understand why people buy them, that's OK. I certainly wouldn't myself. But there are people out there who buy all sorts of weird shit. Spice Girls CDs. Those annoying two-wheel scooters. They are willing to pay because they get enjoyment out of these things.
And what's so "REAL" about money anyway? If you think about it, money is an illusion too - it's a totally artificial construct of our economic system that we use to represent value in the abstract. Most of the time we trade in money these days, we don't pass anything physical. We swipe a card, and a couple of bits get flipped in one electronic bank account, and a corresponding number are flipped in another.
Do you think that's air you're breathing?
Charles Miller
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needs a
."http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#ede
9.3.1 Paragraphs: the P element
[...]
Start tag: required, End tag: optional
Charles Miller
(I don't do XHTML yet.)
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Okay. Things to do when I get home - write a patch for slashcode that allows people to edit their own posts (provided they have no follow-ups or moderation).
Smeg, smeg, smeg.
Charles Miller
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There has always been massive duplication in amateur software development for personal computers. This isn't some magical new phenomenon of Open Source / Free Software. I can remember the huge redundancy of apps as far back as when I used to get those "fish" shareware collections (or whatever they were called) for my Amiga. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. Why?
<p><em>It gives people a place to learn.</em>
<p>Very few coders could walk into a room and immediately start making a difference on a program as complicated as Apache, or emacs. People will always reinvent the wheel, because it's often only by reinventing the wheel that you can teach yourself how wheels work. <em>Then</em> you'll be able to contribute to the super-wheel project.
<p>In the past, these tiny projects would be not released, or end up on an obscure website, or on a shareware disk. Now, they end up on sourceforge. No big deal.
<p><em>We can never predict what will be the Next Big Thing.</em>
<p>Bob's Editor #179 is just another text editor. Cool. And Linux was just another Unix clone. Bring 'em on, and let natural selection sort them out. Those that are well designed, well managed, and fulfil a real need will be adopted.
<p>There seems to be this myth that programming talent is this finite response, and because Bob is working on project A, that means that project B is missing a developer. (You hear this argument a lot about people writing add-ons for Mozilla, for example.) The truth is that while project B might really do with Bob's eyeballs, there's only a small number of "high involvement" developers that a project can stand before it gets top-heavy and falls over. So Bob isn't really going to waste. And who knows, if he learns something cool writing his own editor, his eyeballs will be useful the next time he upgrades his copy of GnomeNotepad++ and finds an annoying bug in it.
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The current big-company-supported initiative for modular devices is HAVi. It's focused on Audio/Visual stuff, mainly the control of a/v appliances, and the transfer of content between them. (So yes, it's mainly VCR's, TVs and stereos, but there's provision for other devices too).
It's APIs are a primarily C++ with future plans to make it more Java-ised. I'd personally prefer Jini, but even if Sun were't being COMPLETE SMEGGING IDIOTS about Jini licensing terms, it'd still be years before we could affordably give our telephones enough computing power to run a Java Virtual Machine.
Charles Miller--
As a counter-example, a female friend of mine recently vanished from the face of the earth for two months. I discovered that the reason for this was that she was spending most of her waking hours on Ultima Online.
I also spend a lot of time playing StarCraft with a (different) woman. She's finished both the game and the expansion pack in single-player mode, something I never bothered with since I prefer multi-player. Similarly, she finished FFVII, when I only got about 25 hours into it, and even helped her son get through Pokemon.
Charles Miller
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I expect that it was moderated as a troll because there's no moderation option for "One-line comment pounded out as fast as possible in order to be the first post."
Although I'd have probably used "Overrated".
Charles Miller
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Saying "Anyone can start their own Microsoft" is just like saying "Any US citizen can become president." In theory it's true, but in practice, it's laughable.
/more/ influence over our daily lives, and certainly have a huge influence over who sits in government.
In one hundred years time, people will look back on the 20th/21st century obsession with letting corporations do whatever the hell they want in the same way as we now look back on the "Divine Right of Kings".
They'll wonder why the hell people who are so willing to put immense restrictions (e.g. the US Constitution) on an elected government would be so religiously opposed to putting restrictions on un-elected businesses, who often have
Charles Miller
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Be still my beating heart.
Just what I've always wanted - a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended, and the other half not work at all. Sure, having a browser written in tcl has some degree of geek-cool, but in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Charles Miller
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The reason that you can't work out who said it, is because it's a misquote. The well-known sentence is actually "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I have no idea where you got the "please" part of it from. I think that the original quote comes from P.T. Barnum, but I couldn't be sure. A slightly drunken Charles Miller
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The only two things that I can think of that qualify as "k3wl features" are the redesigned skins (classic and modern) that were a response to the constant complaints that the interface was ugly, and BiDi support, which has been planned for quite a while, but hasn't landed yet.
There are a number of third-party applications that have been written using Mozilla as a base, such as Chatzilla, but blaming these applications on Mozilla developers is like saying that Linux 2.4 is late because too many people are working on KDE.
I'd also like to add my voice to that of the teeming throng - I use Mozilla as my primary browser on Windows (work) and Linux (home), I usually update to the latest nightly once a week, although I update more often if the nightly is having problems. I don't find it noticeably slow compared to the alternatives. I really don't notice anything wrong with its day-to-day running except a bit of slowness with <TEXTAREA> boxes, and the occasional need to switch back to another browser when I need SSL (I'm too lazy to keep up with PSM).
Charles Miller
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This is how that thing called 'progress' works. Someone comes up with a cool new technology. People come up with hundreds of nifty new gadgets and applications for that technology. Those gadgets and applications that people want to use become household items. Those gadgets that people don't want to use show up in fifty years time as jokes in TV shows.
Go back and look at all the stupid ideas people had when they first came up with that "electricity" thing. Think of the wacky ideas people had about how radio and television could be used. Think of the fact that only about one in twenty high-tech startups survive.
The trick, however, is that it's nearly impossible to tell before the fact which gadgets will be wanted, and which will not. Some things that are really good ideas will tank because it was released in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some things that we all think are stupid will turn into the next big craze in consumer electronics. So the only logical thing to do is to produce all of them, and let Darwin sort them out.
We prosper as a society when we allow people to think as wildly as possible, give them enough rope^H^H^Hesources to try their ideas out, take the best, and let the rest drop out.
Charles Miller
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Actually, it's an amalgam of the words "machine" and "enema". Or maybe I've just been listening to too much Tool again...
Charles Miller
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Going off on a tangent here -- I'm pretty sure that SashXP has nothing to do with active desktop, I'd love to have a Gecko-enabled root window in X, it'd mean I could get rid of a lot of the other annoying things I put up with for the sake of there being nothing else available.
Replacing desktop icons with links would make my day. The icon system in gmc is an ugly kludge. It'd be great to be able to code functionality directly into the root window using simple tools like HTML, Javascript and style-sheets. A couple of tricks with mouse-overs and layers, and you could do write your own application launch menus. A basic <EMBED> API, and you've got yourself a way to swallow apps into the root window in the way we normally do with docks or panels.
With ten minutes, and without having to learn some obscure C++ API, I could write a little bit of code that popped up the current slashdot headlines when I clicked on an image on my desktop.
That'd be cool.
Charles Miller
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IBM's core business is selling hardware. IBM only ever started selling software to avoid being accused of bundling during its antitrust days. Think about it - it's sure be easier for IBM if Linux was mature enough that they didn't have to maintain AIX any more.
I don't see IBM throwing Linux at the desktop market. Sure, they're making the occasional press-release that only gets mentioned on slashdot, and they're doing nifty research projects with it, but they're no more positioning Linux as a desktop OS than they are AIX. Look at the ports they've actually done for Linux - Websphere, DB2, Linux for OS/390 and Domino Server. They've ported the Domino server, but not the Notes client. Server, not desktop.
Yes, having Linux run on your Really Big Servers (and really small watches) attracts geeks. If you attract combine giving geeks what they want (Linux compatibility) with giving suits what they want (big-company supplier), you sell hardware. But I don't see how this is harming Linux at all.
I remember when they said this about the Internet. "Oh, it's just like CB radio. In a few years the fad will be over and only the geeks will be left." Maybe we need an "Imminent Death of Linux Predicted, Film at 11!" meme?
Charles Miller
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IBM are really running a rearguard action here. There are already two good open-source Java server apps out there, Jakarta and Enhydra, and the currently available ones are significantly ahead of IBM's basic offering in terms of supporting the most recent versions of standards.
If IBM released the EJB container, on the other hand, that'd be cool. There isn't a halfway-decent free-as-in-liberty EJB implementation that I know of.
I work with Websphere Advanced Edition for my day-job and really like it, but I don't think I'd bother with the standard edition even if it were open-source - there's already enough code out there, and Websphere isn't particularly friendly to install or configure on *nix.
On the other hand, IBM have been really good lately about releasing Java stuff to the open-source community. The XML/XSLT packages that they donated to the Apache project are pretty damn funky, for example.
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It's a rather interesting insight into how badly IBM has done it's database marketing that whenever your 'quasi-technical man in the street' lists databases, noone seems to remember db2. Charles Miller
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It is very rare that anyone needs to tell the time accurately. Most of the time, you're just interested in the nearest 10/15/30 minutes. The great thing about an analog watch is that you rarely have to parse the entire thing - you just have to get a general idea of where the hands are, and after a while of wearing one, you intuit the rest.
With analog watches, it's also easier to figure out (generally, again) intervals, since you can skip the arithmetic, all you're doing is pattern-matching different locations of hands. Analog watches are also easier to read in low-light conditions, since being able to see the general placement of hands is significantly easier than trying to discern the difference between digital 0 and 8 in the dark. Analog watches are generally less bulky than digital watches, and more likely to survive if water leaks in.
It's all a question of comfort, certainly not productivity. This is why I wear analog watches. Some people may process information differently to me, and prefer digital watches. More power to them.
This is a fallacious argument, because it assumes that the extra milliseconds are cumulative time taken away from productive work. If you look at your watch while wandering down the street, you've lost nothing. Even while you're working, you're constantly task switching between productive and un-productive thoughts, so a few milliseconds extra to look at a watch is just part of that the noise.
Charles Miller
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There's already a pretty definitiveLinux filesystem standard. (FHS, the standard formerly known as FSSTND)
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I've only used Debian indirectly, it's never run on any of my personal boxes (because I'm too lazy), but I really appreciated the idea of having dependancies based on roles, rather than a particular version of a particular program. For example, you can specify that your software "requires a mail transport agent", rather than specifying "requires sendmail".
Debian also got a lot of things right by specifying up-front a standard for package naming. I'm sick of all of my dependancies breaking because I dared to install a non-RedHat RPM.
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"I am in no way a microsoft fan but I'm afraid microsoft has it right with Explorer. You click on My Computer, it opens up instantly, no bloat. You want to use the web, type a web address, THEN it loads up web components."
The reason that My Computer opens instantly is not that there is "no bloat". it is because the bloat has already been pre-loaded when you started up Windows. It's been made sure that the Windows Explorer code is sitting in memory right where it can be accessed most efficiently. Similarly, when you want to use the web, a lot of the web components are already in memory, which is why IE starts up so much faster than any other web browser.
This approach would be possible under Linux, but users would immediately cry foul. "This bloatware uses up xx Meg of RAM before it even _DOES_ anything! I just want to use it for the foo function, I don't want everything else to load as well!"
As for the problems of having to look at every file, this is why we Need A Better Filesystem For Workstations. Windows hacks its way around the requirement for looking at files by trusting a three-letter extension. This can often have really annoying effects (Like trying to work out how to save something from notepad so it _doesn't_ end up named foo.xml.txt) File managers that try this stunt in the Unix world do a terrible job, because file-extensions are not the Unix way. The only files on a Unix system that generally have dot-extensions are graphics and sound files. Finding out what kind of file something is, is what the 'file' command is there for.
What we need, of course, is real filesystem metadata. Being able to stat a file and get (directly from the fs, and therefore efficiently) a file-type magic number, or a MIME Type for the file would make file managers a hell of a lot more efficient. The problem is, the FS writers are busy writing filesystems for _servers_, which don't want to be loaded down with this sort of feature.
Charles Miller
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