> It seems like every developer/administrator I've met wants to ague with that.
As a developer, I'd say you've been dealing with some very bad developers and some incredibly enlightened administrators.
I routinely have to deal with (and clean up after) administrators with that exact same attitude... "it should work". And my answer to comments like that is "yeah, but does it?" Because "it should work" is really just another code phrase for "I changed it and I couldn't be bothered to test it".
> Ask yourself, what would you rather? A great band performing a bad > song written by themselves? Or a great band performing a great song > written by someone else?
A great band can usually make just about anything sound good, and if it's something they wrote themselves you can at least expect they'll put a little bit of love into the performance.
Either option one is far, far better than the more trendy third option of a mediocre band performing a mediocre song written by someone else. And by "mediocre" I mean "usually bad", and by "written by" I mean "grocery list" rather than "artistic".
> While Qt reinvents the wheel so many times, by using its own classes > for many things, like QString or QThread, or by implementing its own > slot & signal system with a C++ preprocessor
They started writing Qt in 1991. I don't know about you, but I was writing C++ on Linux/Unix throughout the 90's, and if you weren't reinventing the wheel and writing your own class libraries, you were either paying a lot of cash for someone else's toolkit or you weren't writing portable code.
I'm sure the situation has improved immensely, but old habits like that...
> Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary.
Speculation. It might have happened anyways. It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight. Or someone might have built a Free clone of the Qt API.
> But Obama was to have the most open government > in the history of humanity. WTF happened??
The obvious happened. The "WTF" part is people believing a promise made be a politician during an election campaign. A politician, I might add, operating at the national level of a major world power.
Suspend and resume on my netbook is a bit of hit and miss (suspend crashes if an SD card is mounted, closing the lid doesn't always trigger suspend). I'll probably update my laptop tomorrow since I rarely use suspend on it.
On the plus side, the upgrade process was painless and things run a lot smoother. The netbook launcher is a good order of magnitude faster than the previous version. The user switcher applet is in the panel now.
> You kidding me? Look at how many privately run prisons there are in the US.
As bad as the incarceration rates are in the US, I haven't heard about a whole lot of children in them. Then again, who knows what RIAA/MPAA lobbyists are doing behind the scenes...
> I suggest we form a non-profit company called "one trip to Mars for every child" > and announce we're going to be designing a spacecraft to take poor children on trips > to Mars. I predict Boeing and Lockheed will have competing Martian colonies with > twice-daily commuter service within a year.
As a counter-example, I'd point out that your scheme hasn't been a huge success for the plethora of "three square meals a day, clean water and some clothing for every child" non-profits. It could just be they need a snappier name...
> let's stop pretending that piracy is awesome and great
> just because some of the claims about it are exaggerated.
Piracy is a bad, but it appears to be better than most of the alternatives we've seriously tried (although there are new models being tried which may prove better) and it's a boatload better than the direction music was going before digital copyright infringement became mainstream and it's giving a thorough kick in the pants to the people who were taking us in that direction.
Economically, piracy is probably not sustainable in the long term. On the other hand, the model where a bunch of greedy gatekeepers slowly trickle out overpriced and overcontrolled garbage via a series of tightly held outlets wasn't culturally healthy.
There's probably a solution that falls somewhere in between, but until we find it...
> > Using the wrong OS can get a company shut down and the officers > > of the company put in jail.
> Ahhhh, the sweet sweet smell of Microsoft FUD.
What? I thought he was talking about the dangers of a BSA raid happening when a company isn't able to accurately keep track of Microsoft Windows licenses?
> Even more surprising is that it requires this glass even > for jeeps that have soft covers, plastic windows, and > no air conditioning.
The alternative would be to leave a loophole in a rule intended to be followed by automotive corporations. Historically, that hasn't worked out so well.
> In some corporate environments there may be reasons > for having plugins that the user cannot disable.
You're suggesting a technical solution to a management problem. There are legit technical reasons why Mozilla shouldn't try to uninstall a plugin which is controlled through some other means, but the decision to prohibit users from disabling things is a management/organizational issue, and I'm usually pretty leery about "features" where the sole reason is to eliminate choice for an end-user.
> Mozilla should block the plugin simply on the grounds that a user can't > uninstall it from within the approved Mozilla add-ons panel.
That's not a bad rule for a personal desktop, but there are certain occasions where plugins are installed from outside Mozilla, and hence Mozilla shouldn't have a means to uninstall them (i.e. Ubuntu Firefox changes are installed via the package manager, not Mozilla, or plugins installed site-wide by a system admin).
The real problem is that Mozilla has some sort of mechanism to ask a plugin "can you be disabled?" Having that mechanism implies that it's okay for a plugin to say "no", and hence Microsoft was just using the API in the intended fashion.
I think it'd be better if they were a little more proactive and just ignored any plugin that doesn't have a disable option. And Mozilla itself should be keeping track of which plugins the user disabled/enabled rather than trust the plugin. It also would be entirely reasonable to have some kind of "disabled until user explicitly enables" rule for any plugin that wasn't downloaded and installed through the browser itself.
Then, I think, it would be more than fair to treat a plugin which violates those rules as active malware.
> Personally, I think it is sad that we even need to ban it.
That's the really silly part... we don't need to ban it. Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving. Before cell phones, our parents and grandparents were dealing with people driving while shaving, reading newspapers, having sex (partner optional), applying makeup, eating, beating the kids, etc. This stuff isn't new, and if we aren't enforcing the laws already on the books, creating a new law isn't going to do a damn thing except (maybe) raise awareness of the issue.
"If you want to criticize, critique, question actions, that's allowable under the First Amendment, and we encourage that," Acevedo said. "When you start actually representing facts, when they are absolutely outright lies, that can lead to civil liability and, potentially, criminal liability."
I'm thinking this means he has a grasp of the concept...
> In other news... 10 year old Linux 2.4 kernel patched yesterday...
Wouldn't surprise me. My organization still has a few 2.4 systems kicking around, and we have the 2.4 source, so if something came up that we absolutely had to patch, we'd be able to. I'm sure there are plenty of others in similar situations.
> since when did it warrant an entire Slashdot story based on one person's > opinion of a book that hasn't even been released yet?
An entire Slashdot story dedicated to bashing one person's opinion of something, anything... it's pretty much the official sport of Slashdot. The main difference in this particular story is that is has absolutely nothing to do with Dvorak.
Slashdot Mirror
> $200 for the unit with the least amount of storage. ...
>
> $30 for a little travel mouse
Where's the "Priceless" punchline?
> ... but when Windows gives me some stack dump in some random DLL,
> I don't have clue #1 what it's trying to tell me.
Ah... you we're on the Windows Vista development team, then?
c.
> It seems like every developer/administrator I've met wants to ague with that.
As a developer, I'd say you've been dealing with some very bad developers and some incredibly enlightened administrators.
I routinely have to deal with (and clean up after) administrators with that exact same attitude... "it should work". And my answer to comments like that is "yeah, but does it?" Because "it should work" is really just another code phrase for "I changed it and I couldn't be bothered to test it".
c.
>> Cory's Sacred Ancestors (or whoever the hell he was referencing)
> He was referencing the founders of the United States who
> write its constitution.
A Canadian speaking at a Canadian conference referencing the founders of the United States as "Sacred Ancestors"?
c.
> Ask yourself, what would you rather? A great band performing a bad
> song written by themselves? Or a great band performing a great song
> written by someone else?
A great band can usually make just about anything sound good, and if it's something they wrote themselves you can at least expect they'll put a little bit of love into the performance.
Either option one is far, far better than the more trendy third option of a mediocre band performing a mediocre song written by someone else. And by "mediocre" I mean "usually bad", and by "written by" I mean "grocery list" rather than "artistic".
c.
> While Qt reinvents the wheel so many times, by using its own classes
> for many things, like QString or QThread, or by implementing its own
> slot & signal system with a C++ preprocessor
They started writing Qt in 1991. I don't know about you, but I was writing C++ on Linux/Unix throughout the 90's, and if you weren't reinventing the wheel and writing your own class libraries, you were either paying a lot of cash for someone else's toolkit or you weren't writing portable code.
I'm sure the situation has improved immensely, but old habits like that...
c.
> Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary.
Speculation. It might have happened anyways. It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight. Or someone might have built a Free clone of the Qt API.
> But Obama was to have the most open government
> in the history of humanity. WTF happened??
The obvious happened. The "WTF" part is people believing a promise made be a politician during an election campaign. A politician, I might add, operating at the national level of a major world power.
c.
Suspend and resume on my netbook is a bit of hit and miss (suspend crashes if an SD card is mounted, closing the lid doesn't always trigger suspend). I'll probably update my laptop tomorrow since I rarely use suspend on it.
On the plus side, the upgrade process was painless and things run a lot smoother. The netbook launcher is a good order of magnitude faster than the previous version. The user switcher applet is in the panel now.
c.
> You kidding me? Look at how many privately run prisons there are in the US.
As bad as the incarceration rates are in the US, I haven't heard about a whole lot of children in them. Then again, who knows what RIAA/MPAA lobbyists are doing behind the scenes...
c.
> I suggest we form a non-profit company called "one trip to Mars for every child"
> and announce we're going to be designing a spacecraft to take poor children on trips
> to Mars. I predict Boeing and Lockheed will have competing Martian colonies with
> twice-daily commuter service within a year.
As a counter-example, I'd point out that your scheme hasn't been a huge success for the plethora of "three square meals a day, clean water and some clothing for every child" non-profits. It could just be they need a snappier name...
c.
> let's stop pretending that piracy is awesome and great
> just because some of the claims about it are exaggerated.
Piracy is a bad, but it appears to be better than most of the alternatives we've seriously tried (although there are new models being tried which may prove better) and it's a boatload better than the direction music was going before digital copyright infringement became mainstream and it's giving a thorough kick in the pants to the people who were taking us in that direction.
Economically, piracy is probably not sustainable in the long term. On the other hand, the model where a bunch of greedy gatekeepers slowly trickle out overpriced and overcontrolled garbage via a series of tightly held outlets wasn't culturally healthy.
There's probably a solution that falls somewhere in between, but until we find it...
c.
> > Using the wrong OS can get a company shut down and the officers
> > of the company put in jail.
> Ahhhh, the sweet sweet smell of Microsoft FUD.
What? I thought he was talking about the dangers of a BSA raid happening when a company isn't able to accurately keep track of Microsoft Windows licenses?
c.
> Even more surprising is that it requires this glass even
> for jeeps that have soft covers, plastic windows, and
> no air conditioning.
The alternative would be to leave a loophole in a rule intended to be followed by automotive corporations. Historically, that hasn't worked out so well.
c.
> I'm still trying to figure out how to divide a group of
> 16 people into thirds without staining the carpet.
They disqualified the audiophile in the group who said they all sounded like crap compared to his $167,578 home rig.
c.
You could do it that way, but I find both of them to be less effective than the "plugins can be disabled by the person using Mozilla" solution.
> In some corporate environments there may be reasons
> for having plugins that the user cannot disable.
You're suggesting a technical solution to a management problem. There are legit technical reasons why Mozilla shouldn't try to uninstall a plugin which is controlled through some other means, but the decision to prohibit users from disabling things is a management/organizational issue, and I'm usually pretty leery about "features" where the sole reason is to eliminate choice for an end-user.
c.
> Mozilla should block the plugin simply on the grounds that a user can't
> uninstall it from within the approved Mozilla add-ons panel.
That's not a bad rule for a personal desktop, but there are certain occasions where plugins are installed from outside Mozilla, and hence Mozilla shouldn't have a means to uninstall them (i.e. Ubuntu Firefox changes are installed via the package manager, not Mozilla, or plugins installed site-wide by a system admin).
The real problem is that Mozilla has some sort of mechanism to ask a plugin "can you be disabled?" Having that mechanism implies that it's okay for a plugin to say "no", and hence Microsoft was just using the API in the intended fashion.
I think it'd be better if they were a little more proactive and just ignored any plugin that doesn't have a disable option. And Mozilla itself should be keeping track of which plugins the user disabled/enabled rather than trust the plugin. It also would be entirely reasonable to have some kind of "disabled until user explicitly enables" rule for any plugin that wasn't downloaded and installed through the browser itself.
Then, I think, it would be more than fair to treat a plugin which violates those rules as active malware.
c.
> ... the National Ray-Gun Association is fighting
> the 3-day waiting period for mad scientists.
Darn right, they should. After all, ray-guns don't kill people... Aliens from the Krthiepth Cluster kill people. With ray-guns. Then eat them.
c.
> Personally, I think it is sad that we even need to ban it.
That's the really silly part... we don't need to ban it. Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving. Before cell phones, our parents and grandparents were dealing with people driving while shaving, reading newspapers, having sex (partner optional), applying makeup, eating, beating the kids, etc. This stuff isn't new, and if we aren't enforcing the laws already on the books, creating a new law isn't going to do a damn thing except (maybe) raise awareness of the issue.
c.
FTFA:
I'm thinking this means he has a grasp of the concept...
> In other news... 10 year old Linux 2.4 kernel patched yesterday...
Wouldn't surprise me. My organization still has a few 2.4 systems kicking around, and we have the 2.4 source, so if something came up that we absolutely had to patch, we'd be able to. I'm sure there are plenty of others in similar situations.
c.
> Anyone running XP knows they're doing it because Vista/7 don't appeal to them ... or they can't buy a netbook with anything other than XP.
c.
> > How do you turn the tap (faucet) on and off?.
> I dont.
> I carry a six pack of puppies around to lick my hands clean.
Puppies are so unhygienic. I just use my own tongue.
> since when did it warrant an entire Slashdot story based on one person's
> opinion of a book that hasn't even been released yet?
An entire Slashdot story dedicated to bashing one person's opinion of something, anything... it's pretty much the official sport of Slashdot. The main difference in this particular story is that is has absolutely nothing to do with Dvorak.
c.