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The downside, aside from the 100% solvable issue of being able to wake up 1,000 computers in the middle of the night without needing a staff of 80 (which was what it took for our "successful" run), is that programming for a grid is hard and tedious, and none of the frameworks that I am familiar with really take it down to the level where it needs to be for "regular" programmers to be able to do it.

You might want to check out Starfish. It's Google's MapReduce implemented in Ruby, kind of. It makes distributed grid computing possible in six lines of code. Unbelievable, but true.

Ian

PS I've personally got nothing to do with Starfish. I read the author's blog--that's it.

Good comments should explain these areas:

a) What you're doing. b) Why you're doing it. c) How you're doing it.

If you document how to do something simple, and that simple thing changes, you now have at least doubled your workload. Instead, make your code clear and self-documenting and maintainers will thank you far more.

I have two reasons to say this. The first is every maintainer's nightmare. Bad comments are worse than no comments at all. We naturally give comments a large amount of trust, so if they are wrong, it can take awhile to realize it. Second, comments must be updated along with maintenance. An excessive amount of documentation greatly increases the workload (and thus, the opportunity for a mistake).

Finally, if you every find yourself writing comments inside a method, ask yourself, "Why is this method so long and complicated? Can I make it smaller and self-documenting?" I find that my ideal documentation comes when my code is only on headers. Often, we refactor how things are done without refatoring much of what and when its done.

By only documenting your method signatures (like with Javadoc, Doxygen, rdoc, etc...) you help minimize your work and maximize your documentation's effectiveness. It will also help you to write self-documenting code.

This is, of course, just IMHO. But, I really dislike people who excessively document on the grounds of that literate programming nonsense. To get a concrete idea of the style I'm promoting, please see one of my open source libraries.

Well, it's worth a try, but you won't have to pay for such a solution, at least not if you made your laptop reasonably safe by using passwords.
I found The Beacon on the Internet (Google Cache, PDF version is on Rufy.com), that's something every moderatley talented programmer can do to secure his laptop... (using cron and scripts).

...don't expect any fixes any time soon. Developers (like myself) work on things that are interesting and fun, IN OUR SPARE TIME. Many of us have day jobs and families and hobbies, and that time is very limited.

But I don't think the problem is manpower. I think there are a ton of smart people who have great ideas. The linux community is just slow to adopt them. Why is ALSA still pissing off Jamie Zawinsky? Because people aren't using all its cool features. It's not a technically inferior solution.

I hear all the time how Project Fu sucks because it has a bug here or is lacking a feature there, and when I ask if the bug/feature was reported, I get silence.

Or, have an active community of users, like what ESR details in his book.

The reason Linux has "fundamental issues" lies solely OUTSIDE the responsibilities of the developers working on it. It is either a vendor problem (i.e. no docs, refusal to provide docs, or threats of lawsuits), or the users (refusing to provide bug reports, testing, or details, or refusal to fund non-essential features).

When someone tells me what I should be doing in MY SPARE TIME, I just go find something else to do.

I have discussed some of the conclusions in Cringley's article on my blog (http://tech.rufy.com/entry/51) to surprising results. I never knew there were so many people reading my blog that were pro-microsoft.

I originally built Web Collaborator in 8,000 lines of PHP over a couple of months. In about 16 hours, I had completely rebuilt it from scratch in the Ruby on Rails framework with 1,000 lines of code.

I have since created sites like The Conjuring Cabaret and S5 Presents, both with astonishing simplicity and rapid development. Rails gives me short-cuts for almost everything I ever want to do with web development.

I would recommend spending time reading the thread and reading papers on the topic, because obviously you have NO IDEA about quantum computing.

In other words, they have not solved the problem of securely distributing keys. which is the claim to which my original post was responding.

If you knew anything about QC, you would know that it solves the problem of securely distributing keys, that is its main function. The encryption itself takes place out of band using the Vernam cipher.

If you are going to talk, at least know about the terms you are using.