| gabriel rosenkoetter on 20 Nov 2003 22:58:02 -0500 |
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This has all gotten to be a bit extreme. My original response regarding Mozilla was tongue-in-cheek. But we're here now, so whatever. I thought about just leaving this alone. I probably should have. But it's hard to resist the urge to defend myself from Toby's post, so I'm going to go ahead and reply. If you're sick of reading this, you may want to skip the middle 3/4s of this email, at least. On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 09:49:36AM +0530, McLinux wrote: > Umm how about Mozilla Thunderbird? Wait, is Thunderbird what they called Phoenix after the sucked it back in and made it into a release? It's liveable. I like Galeon better because it saves the tabs when it crashes. And I've yet to use a Mozilla-based browser that didn't take a big dump in my pants when I center-clicked about ten links in a row without sitting there waiting a few seconds for it to load each. When Galeon crashes this way, you don't even get the cutesy "this application has crashed" GTK window (which I could pretty much do without all the time, come to think of it). Oh, right, sorry, I was saying what I liked about Galeon. It's got the options to turn things like pop-up windows (sometimes you *do* want them) and such on and off in a menu, rather than buried in the prefs. Something about its tabs behave more like Opera than any Mozilla-rendition I've used, and I like that, but I can't quite put my finger on it (especially since I'm on the laptop, where I can't run Galeon because the current version of GTK simply refuses to work with XF86 3 and the XF86 4 driver module for the video chipset in my laptop simply refuses to work with the laptop version of the chipset, though it works swell with the PCI card version, I'm assured). > I have never seen anybody so much grossed with FSF/BSD/GNU stuff. Kind of curious to insert BSD between FSF and GNU... ;^> In any case, my point here is NOT that I'm using things I hate rather than using something good out of self-hatred. I'm using what I do because it's better than the alternative. But, like politics, this doesn't make that choice good, it just makes it the least of the evils. On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 10:22:32PM -0500, Tobias DiPasquale wrote: > Please delineate exactly which piece of Mozilla has no "use". Features removed to honor some vague concept of design: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 Popup blocking that doesn't: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126224 Rendering of HTML in email and news, including contacting remote servers: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28327 And that's just what I could find by glancing at a friend's blog for what bugged him about Mozilla lately. The ridiculous (and slow to load) graphical buttons are pretty useless too. Their purpose seems to be to unnecessarily fill RAM that should have been spent on rendering the damn web page. This'd be fine if I could usefully turn them off, but I can't. (No "text only" buttons aren't the answer, there's still all the window dressing wasting my time.) > As well, displaying _properly-formed HTML pages_ is indeed not that > difficult of a problem. However, attempting to make sense of some of the > junk that Frontpage and Dreamweaver generate definitely is. Both those programs, last I checked, tended to produce rather better-formed HTML than the average human hand-coder. In any case, rendering HTML exactly the way the author saw it on his monitor isn't easy, but it also REALLY isn't what I want. Rendering HTML readably, barring gross errors like missing closing tags, isn't all that difficult. The point of HTML is that the standard degrades. If you don't know how to deal with a tag, you simply ignore its presence and go on with life. > You disparage software that you don't understand, Now, hang on a minute, who made you the arbiter of what I understand? Have I at some point made presumptions about what you do or do not know? I'd ask you to please not make them about what I know. And is the suggestion here that I don't understand how Mozilla works? (Because you're mistaken, though it's not really a point worth arguing.) > and yet you offer no alternative theories or implementations of > this same functionality. You asked a rather simple question (which sure didn't sound rhetorical to me; it sounded like flamebait, as does the message I'm responding to now), and I responded. No, I don't like much software, and I don't like much software because it mostly sucks. > Perhaps a little more constructive criticism and less outright > flaming is in order? I think the record will show that I'm rather frequently constructive, even if I am also frequently critical, and typically do know what I'm talking about. And if you don't think so, feel free to simply not read email that I send. Perhaps you could refrain from ad hominem attack in an ostensibly friendly forum? > "PostScript is just text; open it in an editor." That's > really helpful. Actually, that was an inside joke with Jeff. And he got it. And chuckled. > "Stop top-posting because I don't like it" I recall saying "please don't top-post because it's more difficult to read, and here's why it's more difficult". I can't stop you from reading intention into things I write, but I can and do object to your blaming me for what you read in. > Who gives a shit what you like? So, first off, is that really an appropriate mode of expression here? Second, if you don't care, then don't read what I write. I'm not sitting there next to you shouting in your ear. I'm way the hell over here in my own home taking part in a publicly-accessible forum. > Can you read the message? Then read it and reply to it, not how > its written. I did read the message, and did reply to it, in volume and in detail. Having done so, and been irked by the hoops I'd had to jump through with editing while doing so, I think I was justified in making a request about top-posting. Did you only read the part of my message before the quotes, imagining I was being hypocritical? > P.S. One more thing: the PowerPC architecture is one of the cleanest > around. Mac software aside, they couldn't have chosen a better > computation engine against price/performance considerations. Actually, the PowerPC architecture (as William Magill alludes to) is a stipper version of the far more powerful (and in many ways better) IBM POWER architecture. At least Apple's having IBM do the stripping for them now, rather than Motorola. PowerPC, as in processor design, could be called clean, but the actual OS interface with it (by way of Apple's horribly hamstringed, even after they fixed all the bugs in versions 1 and 2, OpenFirmware interface) is anything but. Note, by the way, that I own about seven PowerMacs, so I really am quite familiar with what is and isn't good about the architecture (and I believe I'm on record repeatedly already stating that it's worlds better than anything Intel's ever vomited forth). On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 11:19:20AM -0500, William H. Magill wrote: > Sun has a myopic vision and enjoys beating a dead horse. They still > think that SPARC is real and that Solaris works. Although, sadly, it's still the best commercial Unix running... > Will the Open Source movement survive Linus? Probably not. Linux > definitely won't and without Linux entropy ensues and the "norm" > reverts to Redmond. I think that's extreme to the point of being untrue on a couple of levels. First, open source preceded Linus Torvalds's use of it by many years, and it's a rather integral part of the Unix development model (at least on the BSD--and I'm not referring to the three modern operating systems here--side of things, if not on the AT&T side). It's just a fancy new name for sharing, or for public domain software. It's not an idea that Microsoft or SCO can magically squash. MS, at least, is profitting way too much by it already anyway, and they didn't get where they are by being dumb enough not to notice that fact. (Where do you suppose most of the fresh-out-of -college coders got the interest to play around with software development... by using closed-source MS applications?) Second... how could the norm revert to Redmond? Isn't the norm *already* Redmond? Do you see that norm somehow changing before the "Open Source movement" fails to "survive Linus"? > The problem with the Computing Industry today is the attitude -- > "Never install release 1.0 because it doesn't work." It's less the attitude that's the problem then the fact that it's true... On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 12:49:21PM -0500, Tobias DiPasquale wrote: > On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 11:19, William H. Magill wrote: > > The attitude that the Computing Industry shouldn't expect things to > > work is CRAP! > You're coming at this from a much more philosophical point of view than > I was. Um, actually William is saying the same thing I was with slightly different wording. > > If American Software writers produced quality products, they wouldn't > > have to worry about "foreign competition," but since "its good > > enough" is the motto of the industry cheap labor can generate stuff > > that's "good enough" cheaper than the expensive American's can. > This is incorrect. I have worked with plenty of Indian students, and > their skills are just as good (as a whole) as the American IT workforce > (mostly because they come here for their education). This yields a > similarly skilled workforce in India that will also work for much less. How is this a contradiction of the material you quoted there? You two seem to be saying exactly the same thing to me: "Third-world labor is skilled enough to do the same job and is willing to do so for less money." I'd offer that third-world labor is often *more* skilled than US labor AND will work for less. I certainly prefer calling Veritas tech support around 2 am when I'm talking to India (that's not a generalization, the call center I typically get in the middle of the night really is in India) than in the middle of the work day. Not only does the representative speak English more clearly, he or she diagnoses the problem more quickly and often more correctly. (Note that that's based entirely on personal experience and is completely unscientific.) > Linus didn't start the Open Source movement (Richard Stallman did that) Hangonaminute. Richard Stallman was working with Kirk McKusick at Berkeley around '71? Gee, I never knew that. -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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