Richard Spindler’s Weblog
Power of Stories … ?
Look at the results of the Austrian Nationalratswahlen that took place yesterday. And think about the persons associated with those parties that scored the best results. Even if you are politically totally ignorant, you might think of some incidents or “stories” that you heard about them. Those Stories create emotions, no matter whether they are positive or negative, but compare some of the other candidates, they are faceless, and you might have never heard of them before, at least I didn’t much.
Coincidence?
Striving for excellence…
…or bowing before the whiners?
That is the question!
I think that the Mozilla Corp. bowed before their lawyer whinies. But now the freetard whinies whine back at them.
Yeah that happens, when you start listening to whiners, they come back to haunt you, and BANG, you’ve lost your edge.
Of course, showing a EULA dialog that nobody reads is not a big deal, but its the attitude behind it, it shows that somebody who is in charge does not care about the little details of the product anymore.
Welcome Mozilla to the world of Mediocrity.
Some more examples of why attention to the little details matter:
(EULAs are like crappy stickers, you know.)
Quote from “Inside Steve’s Brain” from Leander Kahney, page 101:
Ive also hates stickers. A lot of Apple products have product information laser etched right into the case, even their unique serial numbers. It’s obviously a lot simpler to slap a sticker on a product, but laser etching is another way that Apple has advanced the way products are made.
Oh, and other people notice too that attention to detail matters:
What Indie Gear Makers Can Learn from Apple
Oh, and did I mentioned that crappy stickers are another example for lack of attention to detail:
Cheers
-Richard
PS.: I don’t exactly get what this black blob on the right is, but I guess it’s related to the OpenBSD Blob.
UPDATE
Offizial Response
Also there seems to be some controversy about what is actually the problem of this EULA thingi. Just to make my position clear:
I don’t care what this EULA says, I won’t read it anyways. It might tell me about how firefox phones home to google, about how the firefox logo is trademarked and protected, about how the sourcecode is available and modifiable. I don’t care, this is all nice and good.
What I do care about however, is the insulting presentation and click through dialog thingi. If it is included as part of the documentation, inside a README file, or in the “About” dialog, then it is completely fine for me.
Less Lawyer speak and a human readably formatting like the CC thingis would be nice though.
UPDATE:
I do like the Fedora approach.
The right to set a bad example.
Some things are just to absurd to tolerate.
Here a german news magazine complains that a motorbike magazine promotes speeding, and that this is irresponsible. God I hate those whiny bitches, just because someone writes about going fast, doesn’t necessarily mean that readers will try to imitate that. And even if, how about promoting thinking for yourself and that everybody should assess the risks of what he does to himself and others by using his own brains instead?
I guess this is also why I like this entry on planet gnome.
Oh, and by the way the following is a quote from a book that I read recently, I really like this.
Never polite, but always friendly.
Have fun, and don’t listen to the whiners 
Cheers
-Richard
Breakfast for Champions
Never miss the most important meal of the day:
Btw. I have a cool Fixie Inc. sticker on my laptop, which I fetched (the sticker) from the EuroBike Fair that I visited together with my good friend Martin, who is planning to build an electric bicycle.
Have fun in your life,
Cheers
-Richard
Mirror Mirror on the Wall…
Have fun,
Cheers
-Richard
New Apartment
Hi,
I’ve been spending almost all of the last two weeks moving into a new apartment. And my creative energy on finding tricky solutions to common problems.
Check out my new fancy computer desk:
Notice how the cable from the screen runs down into the pot, disguised in fake ivy.
Cheers
-Richard
Spread the word
ungzip my pants and suck my tarballs
Don’t buy 1TB disks, kids
They are not worth the trouble.
Fortunately I was able to fix the 33mb vs. 1tb problem with my WD HDD, using the HDD Capacity Restore tool linked in this article. Data was not damaged, everything still there after the fix.
Cheers
-Richard
4 Days, …
… 8 Men, 3 Cars, Bikes, and a whole lot of flat tires.
Elba
Linus too
Appearently, I am not the only one:
Linus says:
No, the problem I’ve seen in gcc
is that _some_ of the developers seem to be total d*ckheads when it comes
to “language definition”, and seem to think that it’s more important to
read the language spec like a lawyer than it is to solve actual user
problems.