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• 2.4.1-ac1 make install over non-SMP kernel

  1063.61 user 68.00 system 19:06.38 elapsed 98% CPU

• ditto, make -j2 install over non-SMP kernel

  1071.08 user 66.21 system 19:02.35 elapsed 99% CPU

• make -j2 install over SMP kernel

  1481.13 user 138.26 system 13:47.66 elapsed 195% CPU

• MAKE='make -j2' make install over SMP kernel

  1488.33 user 140.50 system 14:02.50 elapsed 193% CPU

• make -j4 install over SMP kernel

  1499.01 user 145.12 system 14:00.58 elapsed 195% CPU

"-jN" doesn't help noticeably on a non-SMP machine; Linux' disk caching is apparently too clever.

For the kernel -- which has a dense directory structure -- a top-level "make -j2" works at least as well as the "MAKE='make -jN'" version, which some recommend. If the source tree is flatter, it might be the reverse.

Any noticeable time saving for jN > num_cpus over jN = num_cpus is likely to be mostly absorbed by additional scheduling overhead.

Of course, YMMV, these timings are valid only for my particular ancient machine during the gibbous moon, .....

Craig

> Good programmers are a scarce resource, and good programmers who'll work for the love of it are even scarcer. This is true but misleading, rather like the greenies' projections of running out of some natural resource by year X based on "current reserves." As free software becomes more popular and widespread, the number of good programmers fiddling with it grows. Never fast enough, true; but just compare the number of talented people hacking Linux and X and other things now with the number doing so just a decade ago. Also bear in mind that programmers will, by and large, "work for the love of it" only on projects that they love; very few programmers would, for example, immerse themselves in some corner of a driver they didn't like or find interesting, just for the sake of some abstract desire to "make Linux (or *BSD or X or ....) better." People who attack this or that project as a waste of time are showing a sort of control-freak mentality; the crucial point that they're forgetting is that the time being wasted (if any) belongs to the programmers who are putatively wasting it; it does not belong to some metaphysical hacker community, much less to any self-appointed arbiter of relative project goodness. Craig

communist anarchism (Marxism);

syndical anarchism;

individualist anarchism;

Christian anarchism (Tolstoy; more accurately called pacifist anarchism).

All shared the labor theory of value, whose sole remaining proponents nowadays are the socialists. This may be the source of your confusion; Tucker was usually classified as an individualist anarchist. The communist anarchists -- the ones involved in the Haymarket Riots -- sneered at the individualist anarchists and called them "Boston anarchists" -- since Tucker's magazine Liberty was published in Boston.

Contemporary political classifications don't always fit historical situations too well. (In fact, some political classifications don't fit the contemporary situation too well.)

Craig

Well, I can tell you why mine doesn't. Looking at my logs, about a third of my hits are from v3 browsers, which don't support it. I like the idea of PNG, I'm sure it's technically superior (I'm not a graphics guru, but I'll take everybody's word for it), and eventually I'll start using it. But since graphics are a very minor part of my site -- mostly decorations to prevent the text from becoming boring -- I see no need to risk about a third of my (small) audience for the sake of technical advantages that are in my particular case irrelevant.

Still, though, I support the idea of PNG and wish every success to Greg and his book and his format. The sooner my .gifs are obsolete the better.

Craig

RMS himself has claimed in a recent interview that about 30% of the code in a basic Linux distribution is from the FSF (although he may have meant that it's under the GPL; one problem in this discussion is that the distinction is not always clear). 30% may be a plurality, sure, but it would have nothing to run on if it weren't for the kernel -- and the kernel couldn't be built without gcc.

So? Linux is obviously a complex product and the distro people deserve whatever money and egoboo they make. FSF software is a central part of any distro. That doesn't mean we're all morally obligated to do whatever RMS says -- or indeed to pay any attention to him at all -- but on the other hand RMS has earned the right to try to make his case for the moral necessity of the GPL -- which he is doing, and taking advantage of the sudden industry interest in Linux to evangelize as much as possible.

Our movement -- and I don't care what you call it, we all know what it is -- includes revivalist RMS, PR specialist ESR, politician BP, executives at Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, and VA, and thousands of hackers and hundreds of thousands of testers, advocates, and kibitzers. That's just the way it is; millions of people doing their own thing on Planet Linux for their own reasons, and none of us has the authority to exile anybody else from the movement.

I personally think this effort -- to replace FSF software purely out of spite, or out of disgust with the press attention paid to RMS, or out of fear that clueless business executives may shy away from Linux because of RMS' mystical advocacy of his particular brand of freedom (or the misunderstanding of the GPL apparent in the rantings of some of its more immature supporters, whose mouths are substantially bigger than their brains) -- this effort is fundamentally misguided.

We're not about "reading anybody out" of the movement. (Some people, like Bruce Perens, periodically read themselves out, then back in again. That's their privilege.) We're about producing high-quality software with a completely open and cooperative development model. If we don't do that, we might as well spend our time and resources collecting baseball cards or playing golf.

So instead of reinventing the FSF's wheel, let's go on to making GNOME reliable, getting KDE 2 out the door, expanding The Gimp's capabilities, bulletproofing our NFS routines, writing USB drivers, perfecting LessTif and WINE, or other things that need doing. Wasting development time just because we're ticked off at what someone says is silly, bordering on the childish. We're supposed to be grownups.

Craig

> The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business.

I would say -- and this is ESR's whole point -- that your analysis is getting it exactly backwards. "The strongest evolutionary pressure" at this point is against the institution of proprietary software, and in particular against Microsoft's dominance of that institution. Linus (and RedHat) didn't go hat in hand to Intel, IBM, Netscape, and the rest begging to be saved and legitimized by commercial investment; they came to us. They want something from us, and as in any free-market transaction, they're trying to figure out (a) exactly what it is they want, and (b) what they can give us for it (whatever it is) in trade.

Free software advocates (and I'm one of them) tend to grossly underestimate the power of their own movement, however disorganized and anarchic it may be (that's something else the suits don't understand, although their institution, the free market, is at least as disorganized and anarchic as ours, and resists all government efforts to "solve" that "problem". What, by the way, makes you think they're any more "coherent" than we are?) -- and to grossly overestimate the power of finance in this movement. We'll be OK no matter what the suits try to do.

As to motivations, RMS is one of the very few the examples I know of who decided to write free software just so it would be FREE. (LessTif is probably another such case.) Much more typical is Spencer Kimball, who started to write The Gimp as an intellectual exercise. He was using Motif, discovered that it sucked eggs big time, and the result was GTK+. Likewise with WindowMaker, Blackbox, Lyx, and probably most of the kernel. Software freedom, for the most part, is a by-product rather than a goal -- note that Netscape freed their source not because of altruism but to hold on to market share.

> ...a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. ... new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.

OK, let me get this straight: somebody writes a fantastic new application for Linux that's just wonderful and superior. It's proprietary and costs money. You have a Linux system. You run free software. Somehow this guy selling his wonderful app has ... curtailed your freedom?

How? Will your Linux suddenly do less than it could before? Will tar and emacs immediately stop working? Or will you simply have more options than before for using your machine (this particular option not being of interest to you because of your a) poverty, b) dedication to RMSFreedom, c) all of the above)?

And what kind of freedom do you value when you would prefer to suppress this proprietary software, when other people may want it, be willing to pay for it, and not give a damn whether they even get the source, much less whether they can hack it however they like? Doesn't their freedom of choice matter?

RMS' views on software freedom are purely religious -- i.e. you need to either accept on faith his moral system, in which case the GPL follows, or not accept it, in which case there is no rational way to defend it.

The "pragmatist" school points out the engineering value of the open-source development process, which is discussible in empirical and rational terms. Guess which approach to open software advocacy is likely to pick up more adherents.

For years now us Linux advocates have been petitioning major software companies to port their apps -- office suites, games, CAD, whatnot -- to Linux. Now they're poised to do so, and the response of the more insecure and easily frightened in our community is "EEk! Not commercialism! No, no, anything but that!"

In the immortal words of Nero Wolfe, pfui.

Craig

Well, it clearly didn't do it very thoroughly.... In fact, what it [business] did was break up the AI Lab at MIT in the midst of the "artificial intelligence" marketing craze of that era, the sole long-term effect of which was to offend RMS' communal sensibilities (understandably enough) and inspire him to dedicate his considerable hacking talents to e.g. gcc and other utilities central to OSS. Prolog and its friends are at best confined to a tiny niche; OSS is in the process of squashing NT, Microsoft's Prime Weapon for dominating enterprise computing. Some "crush."

But in spite of RMS' offended spirit, open software continued to be available from numerous other sources, both in academia (think about BSD and its associated stuff) and elsewhere. The "growth of the internet" by any reasonable metric started around 1983; basic free stuff -- like sendmail, vi, and so on -- were circulating from the very beginning. In 1991, when Linus first put up version 0.00whatever, the internet was a tiny fraction of its current size -- but it was big enough....

RMS himself, by the way, points out that nearly two-thirds of a standard Linux distribution consists of non-GPLed software, so apparently the FSF, for all its valuable contribution to OSS, is still in the minority when it comes to defining the term "free software."

Craig

I don't know anyone whose vision of life consists exclusively of anything. Do you?

Likewise I know very few people whose vision of life does not include food and shelter, though in some cases (notably RMS') in a rather minimalistic form.

> You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why?

Gee, I dunno. I just looked around and noticed that a hell of a lot more great software with source was available now than it was when I first started using it nearly ten years ago. Silly me, I thought it might be because more people were writing the stuff....

> You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why?

I assume it's all right for the same reason I assume gravity is all right; it's inescapable. "A group" is not a thing, it's a word for a number of people who choose to cooperate with each other in some area of endeavor. Show me somewhere a group all of whose members are there with the same motivations, values, and goals and I'll show you a group that is at the very least unlikely to be individualistic enough to do any really superb hacking....

> Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL?

The last time I looked, Linux depended for its GUI, for example, on X. Is that "more" free, "less" free, or "as" free as if X(Free!) were under the GPL?

Note that the definition of "free" promulgated by the GPL is oddly one-sided; many of us object to the habitual use of "free software" as a synonym for "GPLed software", just as we'd object to restricting the phrase "Let's do lunch" (now trademarked by Frito-Lay) to proposal of occasions when we planned on consuming potato chips.

Craig

-- as thousands of the talented do every year when they graduate and get a [gasp!] job!

> 2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits

-- that is, actually paying money to some hackers for working on Linux! Eeeek!

> 3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.

-- that is, enlarging the community (Horrors!) by including people whose definition of "freedom" may not be exactly the same as RMS'. Aaagh!

Craig

Hmmm. The near-ubiquity of transistor radios in the Third World, the green revolution that showed up all the Malthusian doomsday scenarios of the '70s for the nonsense they were, the Ford Model T that set in motion the incredible mobility of the rural population, the ability of a quarter of a billion people or so all over the planet to communicate with each other instantaneously via the Internet, the revolution in "freedom of the press" brought on by the Web -- but these dreams are "seldom fulfilled." OK, sure.

If you're saying "Nothing is a panacea", that's true but trivially obvious. If you're saying any more than that, you're obviously quite wrong. Technological development in the last 150 years has vastly increased the empowerment of individuals.

Craig

Someone posting illiterately as an AC who actually expects to be taken seriously when he accuses others of being "wannabes". How did you get in here, sonny? Didn't Rob card you? Or did you tell him you were looking for your daddy?

Craig

> 95% market share means it's the best product.

Nope. 95% market share means only that for 95% of the purchasers, it's an acceptable balance between functionality and cost on the basis of their individual knowledge. It says nothing whatever about inherent technical quality, aesthetic appeal, efficiency, usability, or anything else.

(And since when, by the way, do us libertarians, who profess a radical individualism, believe that the majority is necessarily right? Politically we reject the tyranny of the majority as firmly as we reject the Divine Right of Kings.)

Now, if you (or any of us Linux -- or Be, or OS/2, or whatever -- advocates) think they're wrong, the answer is to educate them, and do whatever is necessary to raise the functionality and/or lower the cost (not just $, but hassle and time) of your favorite OS. And I think that's what we're doing -- isn't it? -- with improved installation, KDE/GNOME, etc.? (Who have you introduced to Linux today?)

Craig
See -- I'm one, too....

Consider just these two facts --

• Over the last thirty years there has been no global atmospheric temperature rise; in fact, the best evidence says there's been a very slight cooling (within the range of expected normal variation).

• There has been a warming in this century, but nearly all of it occurred before the second world war, while most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere happened after the war.

> You won't happen to represent the oil industry, would you?

No, I represent the five or so billion people whose health and well-being are endangered by mendacious fascists with megaphones.

Craig

It doesn't cover laptops, but most of this could be adapted with a little work (taking a laptop apart is more difficult).

Dagmar's Painting the Computer -- a quick & dirty mini-HOWTO

I think this is a perfect place to repost Dagmar's excellent HOWTO for spraypainting your computer. This was originally a series of answers to an Ask Slashdot question, but they've been collated onto a website.

Find it here: Dagmar's painting the computer -- a quick & dirty mini-HOWTO.