Re: Few bugs, hopefully fixed before freeze

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

I think that some people might be misunderstanding the purpose of a
feature freeze.  Tonight will probably be the all-time low point on
a graph of stability versus time on the CVS tree.  I would not even
bother reporting bugs for a day or two; I am sure that the developers can
see them just as well as you can, and once they are done committing new
features tonight and tomorrow, they will begin fixing them.  Pointing out
the obvious in the interim is just noisy.

DEVELOPERS, DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH:

This month's issue of Scientific American is absolutely wonder,
significantly better than average.  It's about the revolution over the
past decade in cosmology, with the evidence now pointing significantly
away from the previous conventional wisdom that the universe is "flat",
i.e., its rate of expansion slows over time towards some asymptote.
Instead, cosmologists now think that the universe is open and, moreover,
that the first derrivative of the universe's size might be some complex
function, rather than some logarithmic function.  There are three
articles on this topic: my favorite is the one which proposes a wonderful
theory which explains the expansionary behaviour observed topologically,
positing that space-time is a hyperbolic bubble and that the big bang is
the pinnacle of this bubble, and further positing that outside observers
could see into and physically enter our universe through the bubble,
but since the surface of the bubble represents the expansion of space at
the speed of light, they could then never leave.  (Of course, they could
shoot message capsules through this event horizon, which is an interesting
science fiction premise.)  If you're not a cosmology fan, there is also
a good article on a flu vaccine based on inhibiting the enzyme on the
surface of flu viri which allows them to move from cell to cell.

If you don't have commit privs on the CVS tree, do yourself a favor:
run down to your local drug store, pick up a copy of SciAm, take all
of the time which you would normally spend hacking on GNOME for the next
few days, and spend that time instead reading the magazine.

And if you _do_ have commit privs, but disregarded my warning, read that
paragraph, and now want to go out and read SciAm, you have no one but
yourself to blame for your unfortunate state.  GET BACK TO WORK!  THE
FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT IS COUNTING ON YOU!!

8^)  I really do appreciate all of the hard work that the developers
are putting in tonight.  I wish there were a MIME type for a pat on
the back.

-- 
Todd Graham Lewis       tlewis@mindspring.net      (800) 719-4664, x2804

"It's still ludicrous that nobody's ever made a run at us by making UNIX
 a popular platform on PCs.  It's almost too late now."  -- Steve Balmer
"It is too late."   -- Bill Gates             _Newsweek_, 6/23/97, p. 82