After a number of recent hiccups in smooth community working, here's an "Annoyed Contributor" FAQ. [I would abbreviate Annoyed Contributor to AC, but I suspect that would cause a fair amount of confusion.]
Note: any resemblance of situations in this FAQ to actual incidents, living or dead, is possibly coincidental.
Just in time for the end of the year, I've updated Who Owns The Alphabet?, my yearly survey of the battle for domination of the very components of expression.
Basically, it records who's top of the Google search for each single letter. Starting this year, I'm also documenting the top suggestion from Google Suggest for each letter.
Ben is designing a new preferences window for Firefox. This is a great idea - the current pref window, while a vast improvement on the Mozilla/Netscape 4.x style, is still a little hard to get to grips with. As he doesn't have comments on his blog, I have to trackback to give UI feedback, so here it is:
As my email address is in several places on mozilla.org, and I also run the licensing@mozilla.org mailing list, I get a fair amount of mail asking for support for Firefox or Thunderbird. (This is despite Before You Mail Gerv, which probably needs updating for this issue.) Usually, I redirect people to the support page, and hear nothing more. But one guy recently responded to that with:
OH, I see, your about as helpful as the BS website you are referring me too. You both must be wanting money before you can do anything...what a rip off.
Leaving the personal abuse aside, it's amazing to me that someone can say that something they downloaded for no cost is "a rip off"...
Hixie recently felt it was important to point out that "Evolution is a fact" - but he doesn't differentiate between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
Micro-evolution is the process by which species adapt when under pressure from environmental factors. Hixie's post rather niftily demonstrates how micro-evolution works using coins. It's a pretty well-supported scientific theory; I don't know anyone who doesn't think it's true.
Macro-evolution, on the other hand, is what people generally mean when they say "evolution is only a theory, it might not be true!" (We'll have to forgive them their verbal ambiguity.) This is the doctrine that the processes involved in micro-evolution were also responsible for the origin of life.
"What?" I hear you cry. "Macro-evolution is not a doctrine! It's a scientific theory!" Well, what is a doctrine?
More familiar examples of doctrines are "Jesus Christ is the Son of God", "All religions are equally valid", and "God created the universe". So is macro-evolution a doctrine?
Macro-evolution is certainly not provable (point 1). It's never been observed in progress. It certainly doesn't explain all the observed data, such as the mystery of the Cambrian explosion, and requires the assertion of some things for which absolutely no evidence has yet been discovered, such as the existence of transitional species. Therefore, those who hold it to be a fact certainly do so as a faith position.
Those who believe that life was created by mechanistic natural processes are certainly putting their trust in that fact, and living their life by it (point 2). If they are correct, and therefore there is no creator God, then they are fine. But if they are wrong, and God does exist and does care what people believe, then they are in big trouble. In other words, they are betting their eternal destiny on being right.
And lastly, macro-evolutionists definitely urge others to believe that their view is the truth (point 3). Even if you discount such militant atheists as Richard Dawkins, every time someone asserts that macro-evolution is true, they are implicitly claiming that other views are false, their position is better, and that people should change their minds.
So, those who believe in macro-evolution as the basis for the origin of life are certainly no more "scientific" than those who believe life was created by God. Both positions are doctrines requiring faith.
"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet."
Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey
I'm reliably informed that, 10 days after release, Thunderbird has just passed the one million download mark. A nice way to round off the year :-)
Slashdot got quite excited about Aaron Seigo's blog post suggesting that porting free software apps to Windows is a bad idea. He used Firefox as his example.
However, the "removing barriers to entry" logic is why it's actually good for the free software desktop to have Firefox and OpenOffice.org on Windows. What's more likely - an organisation switching their OS, browser and office suite all at the same time, or one at a time? If you don't have to change your apps, switching to the cheaper, more secure, more stable OS is much more of an easy move.
But Aaron is half right. If we have killer apps on Linux for which no functional equivalents exist on Windows, then porting them would be a bad idea. Firefox and OpenOffice.org have well-established competitors on Windows, and so having the free software equivalents on Windows has no downside. This is similar to the logic rms suggests people use when deciding to license a library under the LGPL or GPL:
The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Library GPL for that library... However, when a library provides a significant unique capability, like GNU Readline, that's a horse of a different color. The Readline library implements input editing and history for interactive programs, and that's a facility not generally available elsewhere. Releasing it under the GPL and limiting its use to free programs gives our community a real boost. At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline.
Mehran Khalili commented on my post about forwarding and Google's business model in a post titled "Gmail And 'Don’t Be Evil'". Basically, he agrees with me - which is nice. But he also said:
So I’ve lost about a year’s worth of email as punishment for not logging in [to Hotmail] regularly enough. Somehow I doubt Google would do that to me.
Don't be so sure. The timeout is nine months rather than 30 days, but it's there.
In related news, I noticed that the "Does Gmail support Safari?" answer in the Help contains a cheeky plug for Firefox...
Random Mozilla trivia: with the addition of Florian Quèze ("Fixed various front end bugs, principally in the Page Info dialog"), we now have Mozilla contributors whose names begin with all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet.
I'm surprised it's taken us this long, actually...
As most Mozilla people will have noticed, we've upgraded bugzilla.mozilla.org to the Bugzilla tip (which will soon become 2.20). There's a list of important changes. Add a comment if you have any thoughts about the new system - features, performance, etc.
In other news, we hope to release 2.18 Real Soon Now... it would be somewhat embarrassing if it was overtaken by 2.20 ;-)
A workmate has been getting spam titled "Get Cheap High-Quality Software", followed by a list of mostly Microsoft products. When I pointed out that neither adjective was applicable, another workmate pointed out that they applied not to the originals to the copies - i.e. they aren't making a comment on the quality, but saying "we sell pirate copies cheaply, and our copies are high-quality because they are exactly the same as the original".
Fair enough, I suppose. That's definitely the only way it would ever be correct to apply the adjective "high-quality" to a Windows 98 CD...
Technology Company Releases New Technology! Film at 11!
In other news, a new study has found that bears have a strong tendency to defecate in areas of high arborial density...
A little while back, Gmail, the webmail service to which all others must be compared, started offering email forwarding. Several people were a bit confused about this - a common cry was "hang on - how does this support their advertising business model?" After all, it stands to reason - if people aren't viewing your pages, you aren't making any money.
The answer, is that someone at Google reads Joel on Software (or, alternatively, they are as smart as he is and figured it out for themselves, which I suppose can't be discounted ;-). Way back in 2000, he wrote Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!, which is also reprinted in his book (which is where I read it). The first point of the letter is that to make people switch to your product, you need to eliminate barriers to entry. So far, so fairly obvious. However, near the bottom, he makes a far more interesting point, which is this: "you can get more customers by eliminating the barriers which prevent people switching away from your product".
So how does that work? Rather than attempt to explain myself, I'll quote. Amazingly, he even uses email as an example:
Let's take a more current example: ISPs, a highly competitive market. Something that virtually no ISP offers is the ability to get your email forwarded to another email address after you quit their service. This is small-minded thinking of the worst sort, and I'm pretty surprised nobody has figured it out. If you're a small ISP trying to get people to switch, they are going to be worrying about the biggest barrier: telling all their friends their new email address. So they won't even want to try your service. If they do try it, they won't tell their friends the new address for a while, just in case it doesn't work out. Which means they won't be getting much email at the new address, which means they won't really be trying out the service and seeing how much better they like it. Lose-lose.Now suppose one brave ISP would make the following promise: "Try us. If you don't like us, we'll keep your email address functioning, and we'll forward your email for free to any other ISP. For life. Hop around from ISP to ISP as many times as you want, just let us know, and we'll be your permanent forwarding service."
Of course, the business managers would have fits. Why should we make it easy for customers to leave the service? That's because they are short sighted. These are not your customers now. Try to lock them in before they become your customers, and you'll just lock them out. But if you make an honest promise that it will be easy to back out of the service if they're not happy, and suddenly you eliminate one more barrier to entry. And, as we learned, eliminating even a single barrier to entry can have a dramatic effect on conversions, and over time, when you knock down that last barrier to entry, people will start flooding in, and life will be good for a while. Until somebody does the same thing to you.
And that's what Gmail is doing.
WierdAl invoked my name ;-) in a blog post.
Like Gervase Markham, I am a Christian, and pretty serious about it.
However I'm afraid that, much as I love the guy (and I really mean that), I'm going to have to put a bit of distance between me and him on this one. He says:
Now, when I was in the U.S. Navy, there were times when we weren't able to celebrate Mass for a month. In fact, it was the Navy that (inadvertently, but nonetheless) came between me and God, and that drove me absolutely batty.
This gets to the heart of one of the massive differences between Christianity and Catholicism.
As I understand it, Catholics believe (and Al will have to jump in here if I'm misrepresenting his particular view) that it's vital to go to Mass regularly, because that's where the priest pronounces that your sins have been forgiven. That, it seems, is why Al felt that the Navy came between him and God when it prevented him going to Mass.
But I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation [including the US Navy], will be able to separate [me] from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's from Romans 8, verses 38-39. The Bible clearly teaches that you can have a ongoing relationship with God without the need for any intermediary apart from Jesus, and that it's not conditioned on attendance at any ceremony.
At Mass, Catholics believe, the bread and wine actually change into the body and blood of Christ, as he is sacrificed again for the forgiveness of sins of those present. Catholics are required to attend Mass every week, as the sacrifice is made again and again on their behalf.
But the Bible teaches that Jesus made one single sacrifice upon the cross, and his work is now finished. Hebrews Chapter 10 explains this. Discussing the old, Jewish system it says:
Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest [that is, Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.
By his one sacrifice he has (past tense) made Christians perfect forever. He sat down at the right hand of God, his work done and completed. He is now waiting "for his enemies to be made his footstool", which will happen at the Last Day. So there is no need for further sacrifice, and no need for priests to perform it. (This is why many Christian churches avoid using the word 'priest' about their leaders, to prevent confusion.)
So is this just some esoteric religious quibble? No, it's absolutely key. If forgiveness from God is conditioned on something that is done (attending Mass) then we can't be sure that we are saved. If Jesus's saving work needs to be perpetuated, repeated or "made effective" by ceremonies, then it's power is limited and we can't rely on it.
But, wonderfully, on the cross Jesus cried "It is finished!". And it is. So I would encourage Al and anyone else to study the scriptures again, particularly the book of Hebrews (where a key theme is the magnificence and finality of Jesus' work on the Cross), to see if what I'm saying is true. Because it's of vital importance.
[I've just about cleared the backlog; hopefully this post marks the resumption of normal blog service. Thank you for your patience.]