🚀 go-pugleaf

After having to kill -9 netscape about four times while trying to load
www.colostate.edu to find out when my finals are, I finally deleted the
libflashplayer.so from my netscape/plugins directory and everything
worked fine.  I think this might relate also to the shitty connection
I'm getting to the CSU dialup, but modem connections are expected to be
unstable, software should be able to deal with this gracefully.

I point the finger (and you know which one) in two directions.  First,
at the CSU web team.  I pay my tuition; their job should be to provide
me with the online resources I need, not to produce revenue while
deviating from online communication standards (html) and good design
principles (why the hell is the damn thing in the middle of the page?).

Second, I blame the software industry for producing poor products.  The
whole reason Linux/UNIX is becoming so popular is that Windows is so
unstable that it is becoming unusable.  People are therefor willing to
brave the learning curve for a platform that doesn't need rebooting
every hour or so.  I am very grateful to companies like Netscape, Adobe
and Macromedia for porting their mainstream products to Linux, but the
industry has to realize that programming for UNIX required a higher
standard of quality.  And I don't mean to point the finger at
Flashplayer here (this is actually the first problem I've had with it). 
Like Microsoft products, Netscape is quite buggy by Linux standards and
is used because it's the only product of its kind (see a recent slashdot
article on comparing browsers. No link, but do a search).  StarOffice is
the ultimate example.  It's even clunkier than MS Word on my PII-233,
and though it reads/writes Word97 format, it screws with the formatting
too much to make it useful.  I haven't had it crash, but it's so slow
that sometimes I wish it would just save me the trouble of killing it. 
And what's with the Word format anyway.  It's a terrible way to
communicate.  The goal should not be to allow Linux users to manipulate
Microsoft data formats, but to get everyone else to adopt useful
standards like SGML, XML and even HTML.  And don't say Word can save to
HTML; all it does is bastardize a language that already suffers being
separated from it's SGML roots.

Linux just can't tolerate the instability and code bloat that destroyed
the ingenuity of the Windows user interface.  As much as I think lack of
mainstream applications is the barrier to Linux taking off, simply
porting poorly designed Windows apps to Linux just won't do.  The kernel
may protect itself and other apps from unstable programs, but it can't
protect a program from itself.  And when my work consists of four or
five netscape windows, all of which lock because of an error in one, the
only thing the kernel really saves is the time it would take me to
reboot, and possible a filesystem error or two.  So, all of you
CS/CIS/EE/CE or others out there who find yourselves in the position of
designing or coding computer software (including web sites), think more
in terms of rock solid and graceful apps like emacs, latex, xfig and, of
course, the Linux kernel (all hale).  The world will thank you.

-- 
Adam Carheden
carheden@holly.ColoState.EDU