PieSquared

Could anyone elaborate on which sections of code weren't open sourced originally? That'd be interesting to hear.

Oh, but he was right! People prefer plastic boxes now. Plywood isn't nearly as fashionable.

More seriously, though, I'm pretty sure I know people who did 'get bored' of TV, so it's probably more of a personal choice...

Well, what isn't a clinical disorder these days...?

Ii was, for a while, thinking about trying out emacs, simply because it clearly had superior scripting capabilities... Since apparently Vim can be scripted in pretty much any language though, I no longer see a reason!

I looked at Lightning recently, but it looked sort of as if it was dead. Is it still being maintained?

This might have been interesting if it had any detail at all. However, as it is right now, it's more of a "Haha, Firefox - you're not perfect!" type thing. I think I will check out what the vulnerability was after they actually post it though, so this thread was not for nothing!

Any tips to someone who just got interested enough to give it a try?

Somehow that whole Firefox affair is bugging me. Firefox is a free product, it doesn't come with anything, it costs nothing to buy or use - so exactly what right do people have to say that it should do or not do something (use Google search)?

And yes, I realize that maybe there is some legal right or something or the sort because of the existence of the Mozilla Foundation, but nonetheless...

Maybe they just want you to really NOTICE how big, shiny, and Web 2.0 it is!

I can't help but agree. There is nothing wrong with an organization earning money through its software, whether or not it is open-source. Perhaps the reason that Firefox has actually been able to become a viable competitor to closed-source browsers is because it actually has a source of income, unlike most open source projects.

...if, of course, you're still alive then. (At least for the mountain bike stunts...)

Well, except in this example, many actually will.

Amazon and eBay aren't doing so badly, eh? Although they're hardly the standard for online stores, I suppose.

So... it's compiling it, but acting as an interpreter. So even the macro-evaluation step is compiled?

I seemed to think you'd have to have a Lisp interpreter (so that the macros would have to be interpreted) and optionally a compiler. So you can have the 'interpreter' just be a compiler which is followed by a call to the generated code?

The article author is learning to program. Not learn to program in something, learning to program. I doubt it would be a good idea to tell us that, since it would be, in effect, limiting options for exploration. (Well, or just giving us false data, which wouldn't be as bad.)

FF3, which I have been using for a while, has been great so far. So, even though this is later than expected, I'd still like to thank the Firefox team for making a web browser I like. Good luck on 3.1!

...but I wouldn't say that is a bad thing. I tend to find such debates rather fun to watch and participate in.

"Cheap" is completely relative. 1000 dollars is cheap for a car, but expensive for a sandwich.

Chances are, it won't. On second thought, let me rephrase that: it will work, but it might not be called Web "3.0", since everyone seems to be getting sick of those phrases.

Now all they need to do is add a wireless transmitter, and give these out in U.S. embassies... The price was what amazed me - I knew this was possible, but at that price? Pretty cool.

Ten year olds - yes. A few years older - I'm not so sure. Take the extreme case: should someone able to vote have to? (There are 18-year olds in school, that's what I mean.)

Whoo! More people proving Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

Whoa. Your story is pretty... well, unpleasant, I suppose. Especially at such a young age. It's all too often that people give up on education just because the school system sucks.

At my school, I'm branded as a "nerd", often because I don't think I've joined that group of people who have given up on intellectual curiosity just because the school system is inadequate. What bothers me, though, is that such an attitude is pervasive through a very large portion of my school, even though it is an advanced program school.

Ah well. I hope it will become better. Maybe I'll be able to do something about it someday. I'd certainly love to.

It's unpleasant how many of his points just ring true in my mind instantly. I connected it with PG's essay, too, where he asks why students should have to ask to go to the bathroom.

But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way. There are students who will take advantage of lenient teachers, instead of learning. It is because of them that the rest of the students cannot progress as they could have.

I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.

Looks like they chose the "defiantly unapologetic" correction. I wonder, have they done any studies on which type of correction gives them more traffic? Might be worth it.

I have also gotten that feeling with KDE 4; it feels to me as if it is barely customizable.

KDE 3.5.6, however, I think is quite good and doesn't force you into anything. Everything is customizable, it's speedy (-er than v4 by a lot), and GNOME apps as well as others work perfectly on it, so its not taking over anything.

KDE 4, though, needs a lot of work. I hope the devs improve it quickly, or keep supporting version three for a while, because as it is right now, KDE 4 feels unpleasant and junky.

So is anyone here up to the challenge? Eh?

Although maybe he's wrong about Photoshop vs Gimp, I still think he is correct in saying that some programs just can't be done in an open source manner. A better example might be something like Second Life - there is no way that could have evolved the way most open source software evolves now.

Some things just require immense dedication and concentration from a large amount of people from the very start - and in an open source project, you can't get that until you have a sizable project already done.

As said by many hackers repeatedly, especially PG, languages are slowly turning into their own versions of Lisp. Greenspun's Tenth Rule. When even Java starts having macros...

Personally, though, I think I would be against this. Adding too many such things would turn Java into a language as bloated and complicated as C++ is right now - as if the Java bloat wasn't enough already.

Sometimes I get the feel that dynamic languages (namely the scripting crowd, like Python or Ruby) don't have much semantic checking not because they can't, but because they can use their reputation as dynamic languages to give them an excuse not to. "Since we're dynamic, it's too hard to have semantic checks!"

Which may be true, I don't know. But sometimes I find myself thinking, what if Python analyzed its code like this... then it could detect so and so prior to runtime!

Same thing with speed - CL seems to prove that you can have good speed in a dynamic language.

People who aren't specialists design interfaces they think they'd like. Programmers, therefore, design interfaces for programmers. This is going to suck for consumer apps, of course, because most people aren't programmers - but this is actually a good thing for other programmers. Take a look at Emacs or Vi - is there ANY way they can get more confusing and badly designed from a consumer-app point of view? Yet they're perfect for the programmer.