flamewar's over? quit dousing yourself in gasoline and giving out free matches.

[sun <as387 yfn ysu edu>]

Dan "Effugas" Kaminsky wrote:
> 
> Recently recieved this email.  It's a pretty good self contained suggestion,
> so I'm posting it here.
> 
> Crackpots, eh?  <whistling innocently>

Hisham Petry:

> >Hello,
> > I'm sure that you get a lot of crackpots (probably not unlike
> >myself) who write to you with ideas for improving the user interface of
> >Gnome.  Well here is another suggestion.  On the IBM thinkpad there is a
> >third mouse button that allows the user to scroll with the mouse.  The user
> >can scroll up down, left and right in any window that the mouse is
> over(even
> >if it's not in focus).  I didn't think that it would be useful until I
> >started using it.  You don't realize how much time you spend lining the
> >mouse up with the scroll bars.  There are instances that the arrow keys do
> >the same thing, but usually the arrow keys only move the cursor, and don't
> >really scroll the window plus the window has to be in focus.
> >
> >I don't know what form this would take in Gnome, whether it would be some
> >kind of Ctrl-Shift mouse, or Ctrl-Shift arrow keys.  I can assure you
> >however that it is a wonderful and convenient feature for browsing emacs
> >files, netscape and anything else with scroll bars.
> >
> >The only other suggestion that I have is that I (like many others) love the
> >keyboard, and any time that I have to move my hands off the keyboard is
> >inconvenient, so make sure that everything that can be done with the mouse
> >can be done with the keyboard.
> >
> >Thank you for your time, keep up the good work with Gnome.
> >
> > Hisham Petry

is this an admission that we don't even read the gnome-list, nor do we
pay attention to what developers are working on, deciding, coding, or
caring about? we are, in fact, waaaay behind the power curve on this
one.

let me remind you about how linux itself went public: a college kid
posted a message to a newsgroup to the effect, "hey, want unix on your
pc, but tired of minix? check out some code at <ftp site>." damn college
kid had some code where his mouth was. imagine that.

pages upon pages of design and planned implementation? shhh. don't tell
george this is necessary. he recently posted to his webpage that all of
the panel was going to need to be slightly rewritten to fix a problem
with button-flicker. before you attack him for it, let me state that 1.)
it was probably the code itself, not some white-paper somewhere, that
showed him where this problem was and how to fix it, and 2.) compare the
progress of george's panel vs. the progress of your minbar. good thing
someone else believed in putting code where his mouth was.

white papers, eh? maybe you ought to pay raster and mandrake a visit and
tell them that if enlightenment had been properly proposed, that they
wouldn't have needed to rewrite it between 0.13 and 0.14. while you're
at it, smack raster on the back of the hand for his antialiased truetype
fonts, alpha-channel support for arbitrary drawables in x, or gtk
themes, none of which had the necessary proposals and flamewars on
slashdot dedicated to their existence. i'm sure we all agree he's wrong,
wrong, wrong for putting his code where his mouth is.

dan, don't even bother replying to this message. we're all tired (at
least those i converse with on irc and in private email) of your martyr
complex, and we can all accurately predict how loudly you'd call
yourself a victim and scream "come see the violence in'erent in the
system" and "'elp 'elp i'm being repressed." grow the fuck up. nobody
cares how much you're maligned or abused or flamed or private-emailed;
all we want you to do is shut up and do something valuable. you're
wasting bandwidth with all your noise. show us some signal.

after my ultimatum to bowie he posted a few content-filled comments and
has been quiet since. whether he has been watching, reading, and
learning, or hit by a car, i don't know and don't care but my respect
for him has climbed tremendously for it nonetheless. with your
overdriven sense of martyrdom i simply do not expect to get the same
thing from you. i'm quite sure, in fact, that this single post will
result in the halving of the signal-to-noise ratio of this mailing list
which is already bloated by your worthless rants and screams for
attention which accomplish nothing. consequently, unless by some freak
of nature or wrinkle in the fabric of space-time you decide to sit down,
shut up, quit pitying yourself loudly, and actually subscribe to (and
read) gnome-list, this will most likely be my last post to this list and
will be followed by my unsubscription in another day or so.

have fun waving words, dan.

<whistling an innocent tune about crackpots>

ps. the whole scroll-wheel-mice and center-drag-to-scroll thread was
about a week ago, in case you can get your hands on the archive. go read
it, pay attention to what the real coders say, and learn something
before you speak.
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin