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Re:What about WEB DEVELOPERS? (Score:2)
by shobadobs (264600) -- Sunday June 26 2005 (#12912975)

People romanticize the "Browser Wars", but it's really a big battle over nothing -- a bunch of almost zero-revenue eyeballs using a free product. The strategic value is what people build on top of the browser technologies.

Exactly! Which why we must fight against the Mozilla organization, for it distributes a "gateway OSS", which leads users down the path towards more powerful OSS, such as perl and emacs, which can be downright dangerous, leading to all sorts of permanent afflictions such as repetitive stress syndrome (featured in the well-known film, "Ctrlfinger"), as well as a gluttonous addiction to loosely typed programming languages. Over time, they tend to turn into "hackers," exploiting and even distributing OSS from their basements. This is just the first stage.

In Stage II, they join nefarious communities, with alien names such as "comp.theory," even wasting weeks and weeks to learn foreign languages just to communicate in locations such as "ruby-dev". They also begin typing in tongues. Just the other day, at our clinic, I walked across one addict with a window open, or I think it was a window -- the screen was all weird with footprints and insignia all over it, and in it he was writing material which looked like text yet did not read like text. It looked like he was trying to express something with a violent combination of chomps and chops and splices!

At Stage III, they begin idol-worship -- of demons and penguins, displaying their idols in public with stickers on their laptops. They begin to find pleasure in strange, alien activities, like changing their keyboard layouts around so that nobody else can use them, and buying calculators that read in input in some backwards order, with no equals key, and then they become fanatics who insist that everybody should learn this backwards method! If you ever see somebody lend out a calculator and then smirk when a borrower innocently walks away, you know they have reached Stage III.

At Stage IV, they wonder how to emulate their freshly bought calculator on their computer, in one of the tongues that they have learned. Those who have spent weeks of using the powerful and addictive OSS called perl begin to write "rpn.pl" in progressively smaller scripts, using that violent abortion of chops and slices. First, they make one that works in twelve lines, which is unhealthily short already. Then they naturally levitate towards three lines, two lines, one and a half lines, exhibiting some obsession towards achieving their goal in less than 80 characters. Some succeed, but only after several nervous breakdowns and complete distachment from spouse and family. Some begin their ramblings with references to primates, as seen in one quotation I've seen,

        perl -ape
        'eval((q[push@s,$_],"\$s[-2]$_=pop\@s"
        )[/^ [-+*\/]$/])for(@F);$_="$s[-1]\n"'

If they succeed, this usually means that Stage V has been reached. It is believed that they begin to realize that they are seriously damaged, because they rather suddenly start mumbling about the "brainfuck" they're enduring. This realization dies away quickly, as they type out long meaningless random strings.

Occasionally, they manage to come out from their mental ruts, but only for short periods of time. These spells give our researchers a rare glimpse at what happens to their minds, as they make repeated references to things that don't exist, except perhaps in their hallucinations. They still have connections to their dreamworld. For example, I mentioned to one patient about how my niece got an A++ on a recent examination in school. And the patient replied, "She got a B? Well, better luck next time." He must have misheard, or so I thought, so I answered, "No, she got an A++," enunciating the A + + slowly. And the patient smiled knowingly, responding: "Exactly. I hope she gets an A next time." I gave up on that conversation.

There are further stages of this terrible affliction, but they would be too graphic to list here. My point is, this "Firefox" isn't just a harmless OSS that causes minor but and temporary impairment; it is the first step of a path towards destruction, and we must fight its spread with all our resources.

Re:War? It's a revolution. Fight for your Freedom. (Score:4, Funny)
by houghi (78078) on 03:24 PM -- Thursday June 22 2006 (#15585538)

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in courts, we shall fight on the Web and Usenet, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in cyberspace, we shall defend our Imperium, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the portable, we shall fight on the games boxes, we shall fight on the desktops and on the handhelds, we shall fight in the media; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Imperium or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our bought senators, armed and guarded by the BSA would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World Order, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Face it, Mozilla is dead (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on 11:24 PM November 20th, 2001 (#2594565)

There comes a time when the only merciful thing to do is pull the plug. When the old-timer has been bloated and incontinent for as long as anybody can remember, it can only be considered an act of kindness to turn off the machines and let a dear friend finally breathe its last. So long, Mozilla, old chum -- sorry it had to come to this.

Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be. No matter how many people are exhausting themselves by pounding on the corpse's chest, the best thing the population of the Net can do -- both for the good of the Mozilla Project and for themselves -- is strip what they can from the body, say a fond farewell and get on with their lives.

Things weren't supposed to end this way. When Netscape played their Hail Mary and released the Navigator source code to the public, it heralded a new beginning for the Web. An open source browser was going to -- in order of difficulty -- save the world, resurrect the dead and beat back the Microsoft juggernaut. Alas, the great, green hope instead ran headlong into nearly every obstacle a software project can face, often more than once, usually as a direct result of its own pig-headed stubbornness. Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.

Even the Project's most ardent supporters have to admit the possibility that their bouncing baby browser now more resembles a massive, festering cyst. Trapped in the womb for well over two years, the Mozilla Project has made a lot of noise, churned out a lot of code and has gone almost exactly nowhere. Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight. A quick and painless euthanasia is the best option for all concerned.

As usual, the blame can be placed on the lack of responsible adult supervision. Told to create a utopia, the Mozilla Project's programmers have done almost exactly the opposite, letting their far-thinking vision overwhelm such tedious, day-to-day tasks as actually getting a usable one-point-oh product out the door. Oblivious to the fact that their market share was disappearing faster than donuts in the break room, the Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit. With the sort of over-enthusiastic zeal that used to get missionaries attached to roasting spits, the Project couldn't satisfy itself with merely building a fast, efficient, standards-compliant browser. Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster. The Mozilla Project abandoned the idea of creating something as dull as a browser in favor of building a meta-application, an everything-to-everybody miracle.

Beware of geeks bearing gift economies. Cool, high-tech and nearly pointless features have beset Mozilla like metastasizing tumors. XUL, the Extensible User-Interface Language, gives any moderately competent programmer the ability to completely redesign the program's GUI. Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature. Does the world need another HTML editor? Chat and instant messaging? Oh, sure. Another news reader? Another mail client? Of course. Vector graphics? MathML? ColorSync? LDAP? Embedding? A cross-platform component manager? A cross-platform widget set? An XML parser? XSL transformations? Yes, yes, yes; more, more, more. Each and every one of these features has found its way into the mainstream of Mozilla development, without rhyme or reason, without a clearly defined market or an interest expressed by anybody without a computer science degree.

At the very least, the Mozilla Project has given the world a pretty good picture of what caffeine poisoning looks like. Only people who never sleep could possibly justify adding any of these toys to a mass-market consumer product before it ships its first version. Coding is fun and all, but come on. There's nothing magical in open source projects that prevent them from becoming feature-bloated boondogles - in fact, absent normal market pressures, it's more likely. It's time, Mozilla: Ship or get off the pot.

The tragedy is that it's all been done before, too -- those who don't remember history are doomed to re-implement it. The Mozilla Project is reproducing, almost one-for-one, all the strategic mistakes Netscape made three or four years ago when Navigator exploded from a simple, boring, functional browser into a platform of its own. The plan was to take over the world then, too, making whichever desktop environment the user chose to run irrelevant in the face of the feature-bloated "Netscape OS." And, boy, remember how well that worked out.

And so: End it. Pull the plug. It's time to abandon Mozilla, to let it go in peace. The parts that work -- nearly everybody agrees that the Gecko layout engine is wonderful; the project management tools are nice -- should be harvested for use by the living, and the rest tied up in a biohazard bag and burned. It's a little sad, yes, but it's also the only reasonable option left.

The rotting smell has gotten too strong to ignore.

*BSD faces a very bleak future. I've seen the same boring cut-n-paste "BSD is dying!" trolls for years now too, so don't dismiss what I have to say as another one of those. I researched many compartive points about all the various flavours of *BSD after my comptroller asked me to deploy an OpenBSD firewall.

Granted 4.2BSD was a very fine OS, but that was in 1983. 4.4BSD, and its brother 4.4BSBD-Lite, were abymsmal performers at best during their heydey in 1993-4. Both Solaris and HP-UX had networking stacks that supported "long fat pipes," multicasting, and TCP header header prediction years before 4.4BSD did.

I don't know why 4.4BSD-Lite became so popular. Perhaps because it was released as OpenSource in 1994? But even then there were much better TCP/IP stacks and VM schemes in use (Solaris, AIX) so availability of source code was an insignificant win at best. All OpenSource does is allow poor quality code to be re-circulated and reused again and again in new systems, while high quality and RFC compliant code is relagated to the pay environment.

Regardless, the codebase of 4.4BSD-Lite became the stepping stone for all the *BSDs that are still around now. The main three *BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all use at least 85% of 4.4BSD-Lite's source code, with the rest being mostly new userland code, TCP/IP updates, and multiprocessor support.

The commerical offering, BSDI, is even more appaling - a source code diff shows roughly 94% code reuse. Paying for an archaic and outdated OS...that would explain why BSDI has less than 2% of the server market.

FreeBSD has very close ties with BSDI. I'm not one to preach doom by association, but I'm afraid FreeBSD has doomed itself by the move. If that isn't enough, FreeBSD's C2 security certification is horrible. Even NT can do better than it!

FreeBSD has a reputation of being the "fastest" BSD on x86 hardware. Actual memory bandwidth performance is a fraction of all of Sun's offerings, and the multiprocessor support is a joke since it has a poorly implemented semaphore locking mechanism. I hear a total re-write is planned, and perhaps even a security audit too, so /maybe/ by 2005 FreeBSD will be a contender in the low-end server market.

NetBSD, I'm afraid, is dead before it got off the ground. The goal of running on as many platforms at once is a noble and idealistic one, but in the real world its useless. At best NetBSD is a mediocre hobbyist OS that runs on outdated computers. A match made in hell it would seem, since ancient source code has been hacked to run on ancient computer. Its ports to systems such as the Dreamcast are total folly, offering no more real world use than GUI systems on headless servers. And I think the installed user base of less than 10,000 speaks for itself.

I was hopeful OpenBSD would be better as its reputation for security is interesting. Sadly, its another strikeout. OpenBSD's filesystem is extremely slow, and hardware support is nearly nonexistant. There are also numerous political issues surrouding its development team that are eating away the last bit of hope. Perhaps the reason it is secure is because no one bothers to hack it since the "prize" is mostly worthless.

*BSD users too are dooming thier own OS. As a group, they are a very vocal and rowdy bunch. No real help is given to new users and such an elitest attitude is suicide.

I chose to not deploy an OpenBSD based upon these reasons. It is my humble opinion that either NT or Solaris be used for any significant work, and *BSDs be left to the hobbyists.

An update on Slashdot from I, CmdrTaco. (Score:0, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on 04:13 PM February 21st, 2003 (#5357552)

Hi there. I'm CmdrTaco, one of the ruling despots here at slashdot. Earlier today I realized that I've been deeply troubled by recent events here on slashdot, more troubled than I've been willing to admit to myself. The plebs here have been making alot of noise in the last 24 hours, ever since this thread arose on the "Oracle Breakable After All" story. My attitude was the usual "fuck them all", and I thought the matter undeserving of even a moment of my time. But then a strange thing happened; I was stricken by impotence. I beat and I beat and I beat, and yet even with the aid of the very finest tentacle-rape anime divx selections available, I found myself unable to climax. Even having Hemos choke me with his belt till my face turned blue failed to do the trick. Clearly, something was terribly wrong.

And so, I went soul-searching. I thought back on the other night and the bitchslapping rampage I went on in that thread. I thought of some of the very low UIDs whom I'd smacked down, I thought about the many user moderations that me and the other editors had unjustly overturned with our unlimited mod points. I considered the outcry, the suggestions that we were ignoring the will of our own community, that we were evading a subject that desperately needs discussing, that we were acting autocratically and making hypocrites of ourselves. All these things I pondered, and I pondered long and hard. And this is what I have to say:

Go away.

When me and Hemos began this site so long ago now, we were starry-eyed small-town lovers; young, naive, and drunk on the possibility that a real revolution of sorts might be on the horizon, and that it might involve small furry animals. And so we opened up our labour of love to the world, never suspecting that it would become even half of what it has become today. Things were good, for a time.

But things change. None of you could ever understand just what it feels like, and what it does to a man, to have such a large userbase grow up under your shoddy perl scripts. Unless it happens to you firsthand, you can never truly know. They say that power corrupts, and I am here to tell you that it is true. Once, I cared. I really did. But you people... you went from being individuals, from people I could care about and chat with on #slashdot, to becoming a giant formless mass.. a formless mass seperated into factions; an army of idiots filling my inbox with crap and my RAID array with drivel. Every thread now, I'm lucky if I can find a single comment that doesn't appear to be stamped down by a dim-witted cookie-cutter of a mind. Endless parrotting, pompous bullshit, and people so one-dimensional that it is frightening. I have a secret for you: I too believe that the absurdist noise and distraction of the 'trolls' is the most worthwhile part of slashdot these days. I don't care about anything anymore, save bukkake vids and the occasional good troll.

So then, why do me and my editors censor with an iron fist? Why do we stamp every bit of humour and joy left in this place out and try to make it more and more soullessly grey with each passing day? Because I don't want to have a dialogue with you fucking plebs about the deterioration of this site, I don't want to save it; I want this failed experiment to implode upon the weight of its users' own hypocrisy and hyperbole. You say this site should be a microcosm for the free and open society of the future? Don't you see that it already is? And you wonder why it stinks of shit...

It will continue as it has. The majority of you will come regardless of what we do. I could piss on your mothers and assfuck your fathers and you'd still come to stroke your egos and share your reactionary politics with the world and to waste countless more hours of your miserable days away. The arms-race will continue. You think a bit of mass -1 Offtopics is bad? Brotha you ain't seen nothin yet. The editors will continue to be my hand-picked squad of the biggest fucking assholes I can manage to dredge up. We will continue to ignore your whinging about censorship, indeed we will ramp it up, because we don't fucking care. There will be countless more stories about the latest lame yuppie toys, the latest minor kernel revision, "look what I found in subsection 123.23.1c of this license!", and all manner of other predictable crap for you to hurl your canned responses at and exercise your dogmas on. Katz will continue to offer you his unique brand of insight until the end of time. And we, as always, could care less what you think or want. Droids and trolls alike; you will all lap it up.

You were expecting some great revelation or commitment to reform to become of this? hohohoho... as if I give a damn about the silly dramas you fools generate out of bit-patterns slapping into my DB. I was troubled, but only because I cloaked my true opinions in silence and continued to play the role of naive otaku-boy and open-source ass-puppet. Because I wasn't being honest with myself or with all of you. Now I can speak the truth, and my soul is unburdened. You may now go back to wallowing in the shit; I'm off to blow my load in Hemos' pretty pink face.

Remember this: we are only a mirror.

Thank you.