Pacabel

How does that help in situations where HTML isn't being used, though? I'm thinking of plain text emails, discussion forums that don't allow custom markup, discussion forums that generate markup automatically for URLs, and so forth.

From what I can tell, you're suggesting that it's perfectly acceptable for somebody to lose his or her job merely for expressing a stance against gay marriage.

Does that mean that it's also perfectly acceptable for somebody to lose his or her job merely for expressing a stance in favor of gay marriage?

Sure, I can see them being different things. But that doesn't meant that they both can't be involved at the same time.

Maybe what Eich is facing is seen as "punishment" by some, but it is indisputably discrimination, too. Losing one's job solely because of one's beliefs is a form of discrimination, regardless of what those beliefs may be.

I don't see how you can seriously say that you're against discrimination and those who discriminate, yet you'll resort to that exact same discriminatory behavior while supposedly trying to stop discrimination!

How exactly do you figure that? The act of not tolerating intolerance is itself intolerance. It will always be around, if we take your approach. The only way to full tolerance is to be tolerant of intolerance.

Well, this whole incident involving Eich is a pretty good example.

I have to ask, do you realize how hypocritical some of your statements sound?

I'm talking about ones like, "I for one am glad that he was put through the wringer and hope anyone else that believes in any form of discrimination and wants to lead a company gets the same treatment or worse."

On one hand you decry discrimination, but then on the other you encourage discrimination against people who you've deemed to have engaged in discrimination. It's very contradictory, and suggests that you in turn should then be subjected to some very negative treatment, "or worse".

It's pretty well established at this point that those who scream the loudest about how important "tolerance" is often prove to be among the most intolerant in practice.

The same is holding true for those who are against "discrimination". They'll often have absolutely no qualms about using one form of discrimination in their quest to bring retribution to somebody else who may have engaged in something they consider to be discriminatory behavior.

How does a non-static list of issues to resolve really help? The latest was added merely 4 days ago.

If anything, that's yet another way to justify not getting a stable release out there. It's the old "We can't release yet, still have bugs to fix!" trap that catches many software development teams.

There will always be some issues, so insisting on a vague notion of "perfection" becomes far more harmful than just getting at least something out there than users can actually use.

What does "really ready" mean when it comes to Rust?

That's the kind of vague goal that people will keep using as an excuse for not focusing on stability, and providing a product that's actually usable.

When it comes to programming languages, it's dangerous for their implementors to not produce something that's seriously usable as soon as possible, even if it means accepting some imperfections in the early stable versions.

With each passing day, Rust becomes closer to being something like Perl 6: anticipated, probably useful, but never actually "ready" enough to be usable. While I'm more optimistic about Rust potentially having a far brighter future than Perl 6, the lack of stability does cause unease.

In practice today, IP basically is just IPv4. And that won't really change until IPv6 is supported by more than a comparatively small handful of networks and users.

Have you tried looking at this situation from a different viewpoint?

The responses of many of those people who are against Eich in this case can best be described as "vile, hateful and vicious", to use your words. Their calls for him to lose his job, or for Mozilla as a whole to suffer boycotts, can be described as an effort to "enforce misery, shame and frustration".

The problem here is that we have some people claiming to be against discrimination, yet they in turn have absolutely no problem engaging in such behavior toward Eich.

I think that this sort of hypocrisy really undermines their cause, and most of them don't seem to realize this.

He could very well know that any clarification, regardless of what is actually expressed, will be turned against him in one way or another, and will be used to further propagate this issue's prominence. Saying less may actually prove to be the quickest way to get an issue like this to blow over.

It's kind of absurd to see this sort of contradictory reasoning.

I think there'd be outrage if it was suggested that some employee of some company should be fired just because he chose to spend his own time and/or money supporting a pro-gay cause.

Yet as we've seen in this case, it's apparently deemed perfectly acceptable by those who'd be outraged in the other case to level the exact same kind of discrimination against somebody who supports an opposite viewpoint.

I can't see how such contradictory behavior will help garner support. Fighting discrimination with discrimination is self-defeating.

Realistically, if anything is going to "destroy" Mozilla, it'll probably have much more to do with their software offerings than with this particular incident.

I'm talking about things like Firefox trying to imitate Chrome at the expense of usability. Or the abandonment of Thunderbird. Or resources wasted on a failed effort like Persona, or wasted on software like Firefox OS that's inherently inferior to its many well-established competitors.

Mozilla's influence is directly related to the number of people using its software products. I see far more of its existing users moving away from its software due to usability problems or a lack of maintenance than I see moving due to purely political anger directed toward Eich.

What exactly are you asking?

They have their beliefs. You have yours. You presumably want to be able to hold your own beliefs. They presumably want to be able to hold their own beliefs. You may disagree with their beliefs, and you should be free to express this, if you so desire. They may disagree with your beliefs, and they should be able to express this, if they so desire. It's irrelevant who "you" are in this case, and who "they" are.

Even if they choose not to respect your ability to hold your own beliefs, it's probably best if you still respect their ability to hold that belief.

I don't think he necessarily meant that you need to respect the beliefs themselves, especially if you don't agree with them.

Rather, I think it's more about everyone respecting the ability of everyone else to hold their own set of beliefs, even if you disagree with theirs, and even if they may disagree with yours.

In this particular incident we've seen a lot of hypocrisy. We've seen a lot of people calling for "tolerance" and "equality", yet to them that means merely that their viewpoint must be the only one that can be held or expressed. It ends up being a very quaint, twisted interpretation of tolerance and equality.

You're right, that is generally a better option these days. Unfortunately, it still does suffer from the same problem, to some extent. Settings are sometimes renamed, and then it takes some time and effort to track down the new name, assuming the setting (or an equivalent) still even exists.

It's good that Firefox can be customized, for sure. But I'm finding that after each major release these days, I need to perform more and more customization just to bring it back to a usable state.

I want a practical browser that does what I need it to. Yet with each new release of Firefox we tend to see further useful functionality stripped away, additional config panel options removed, and the UI dumbed down in one way or another. So whenever an update happens, it's off to searching for add-ons to basically undo whatever unhelpful changes the developers have just made.

Add-ons and customization should be there to enhance and already good piece of software. They shouldn't be there as band-aid that's applied to fix the numerous mistakes and bad decisions of the software's developers.

Quality discussion isn't supposed to always feel good. Nor is it a bad thing when what you've expressed is heavily analyzed and perhaps contested.

It's really no different than physical exercise. Yes, it can be painful in the short term, but over time it allows adaptation that increases strength and robustness.

As a former long-time Slashdot reader, the progressively-worse site designs were far, far more disruptive and harmful than any changes in the quality of the discussion might have been.

Their beta site was what made me stop visiting earlier this year. The fact that such an unusable design could seriously be considered in the first place was partly responsible. Their lack of action when confronted with lots of very legitimate concern regarding the beta site was also responsible.

Maybe things have changed since then. But I wouldn't know for sure, having not bothered to go back there.

The debate will still be there either way, will it not? It's probably preferable to base such discussion on a correct log of the events, rather than speculation and unsubstantiated allegations.

Why is that?

Sometimes the only reasonable and legitimate response to certain ideas and claims is to dismiss them. It's much the same for negativity. Sometimes a negative response is the best one.

Highly sanitized, politically correct, feel-good discussion is pretty much pointless to engage in. The best value and insight often comes from asking the hard questions and pointing out flaws that are painful to acknowledge.

It might not feel pleasant all of the time, and it might not make people happy, but engaging in discussion in a way that some people may consider "negative" or "dismissive" often gets the best results for everyone involved.

One thing I've noticed a lot of with many of the arguments regarding this particular incident is blatant contradiction and hypocrisy. While these aren't unusual, they're particularly bad in this case.

This article, for instance, states the following: "Indeed, any right withheld from any group of people must be rallied against."

Yet the author makes that very claim in an article that basically suggests that people should not have the right to oppose homosexuality or gay marriage, and should not have the right merely to express such beliefs. He should be rallying against his own article and his own stance, in fact.

I'm not suggesting that he or anyone else should be denied the right to hold or to express contradictory or hypocritical viewpoints, of course. But the use of such arguments does make it hard to take one seriously, regardless of what the issue at hand is, and regardless of the position being expressed.

GCC wasn't stagnant at all. There were relatively frequent major releases including ports to additional platforms, very good progress implementing stuff like C++11, better optimizations, and many other important improvements.

Clang has helped show some additional areas where GCC could perhaps be improved, but GCC was surely not "stagnant" at the time. It wasn't like during the EGCS situation in the 1990s.

I don't think that that's the case at all.

Even if we ignore the obvious differences in philosophy and implementation between the two, we're better off that they both exist solely because they've acted as hedges for one another.

When KDE 4 was released, it wasn't exactly ready for widespread use. While things did rapidly improve, GNOME at least provided an option for those who wanted a more modern desktop environment than KDE 3.5 in the interim.

The opposite situation has happened more recently. GNOME 3 was a complete disaster at first, and in many ways still is. Many former GNOME 2 users switched to KDE 4, by that time a mature and very usable desktop environment. Since we have seen only minimal effort from the GNOME 3 community to address its severe problems, the existence of KDE has become more critical for more users.

I have to ask, did you even read the first sentence of the email from James Jones of NVIDIA? It says, "This direction seems to conflict with our plans to continue running our DDX driver under XWayland." The rest of the email isn't exactly positive, as well.

"Progressing so quickly" just isn't the first thing I think of when hearing about difficulties like those described in that email.

Why do you think that "much shorter" implies "more understandable"?

I think we have a lot of experience to suggest otherwise.

Anyone who has had to maintain old Fortran or C code will likely know what I mean. With some early implementations limiting variable and function identifiers to 8 characters or less, we'd see a proliferation of short identifiers used. Such code is by far some of the hardest to work with due to variable and function names that are short to the point of being almost meaningless.

Then there are languages like APL and Perl, which make extensive use of symbols. APL has seen very limited use, and Perl code is well-known for suffering from maintenance issues unless extreme care is taken when initially creating the code.

Balance is probably best. We don't want excessively long identifiers like is often the case in Java, but we surely don't want excessively short ones, either.

When people who claim to promote tolerance end up acting in an intolerant manner, it hurts their credibility. It really doesn't matter what their cause may be. Contradiction and hypocrisy generally don't make situations better.

Why is asking for more information considered "silly"?

Why is trying to get a more complete view of the situation considered "silly"?

After running into such problems with it so quickly, why did you continue to try to use it?

Problems of that sort were understandable in 1995, when Linux and the few distributions available at the time were still relatively immature. They were even understandable in the very early 2000s, when hardware support sometimes wasn't great. But these days, there's really no excuse for a lack of quality like you're describing.