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Slashback: Arch, Bubbles, Keystrokes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lancaster-tomorrow-woohoo dept.

Slashback with updates tonight on keystroke tracking (but not spying), OddTodd's interesting approach to unemployment, cold fusion, and an appeal from the Arch folks. Read on below for the details.

This research could still lead to new and powerful sink cleansers. mrsalty writes "A topic of brief and skeptical discussion back in april, Sonoluminescence as a fusion catalyst seems to be circling the drain. According to this BBC News article, new research shows that the collapsing bubbles' temperatures fall a bit short of that needed for fusion. A bit in this case being a few million degrees."

Discretion is sometimes the better part of avoiding attention. stinky wizzleteats writes: "Looks like OddTodd got off on charges that he defrauded the State of New York by starting www.oddtodd.com (Laid Off Land) while receiving unemployment payments. I didn't know he was only getting 67% of the take (his provider was getting the rest, which sort of explains why the site didn't get /.ed when the first story about him was run."

Try explaining this one to your parents. Earlier this year, we posted about Project Dolphin, an effort to measure the number of keystrokes you make as you IRC, email, program, whatever. Now, Wes N. a.k.a c3 writes with a largish update from the project's homepage, excerpting:

To this end, Dolphin has found itself its own dedicated server that serves as a home that is now (finally) suitably equipped to handle the growth we want to see, and fully expect. Previous participants will notice that this site itself has been fully redesigned and revamped toward a more professional look, while remaining commercial free in the original spirit of the project.

At the very core, this is a research project for its designers. It's made by geeks and it's made for geeks. The positive feedback received over the last few months since its initial launch has ensured that it will continue along it's current path of growth in the spirit of fun and experimentation for the forseeable future. (end from website) The new version of project-dolphin's Pulse is due to come out any time now. The new version is supposed to have a few bug fixes and how loads of new features. to check how the progress is coming along check out The development website some of the new features include . Typing Activity tab, Keystroke Frequencies chart , and alot of other neat stuff check it out on the website or goto irc.project-dolphin.net #projectdolphin on IRC."

"Arch" is adjective, verb and noun in one. When it comes to replacing CVS, Subversion is not the only game in town. We posted in May about the even-more-ambitious arch revision control system. Now, bshanks writes: "Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system (slashdot article here), needs some monetary help."

13 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. A lucky SOB :) by Lancer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looks like the judge agreed that the site was meant as a joke, even if he did end up cashing in - good for him, but I don't think I'll go into business being out of work :)

    --
    Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
  2. Keystokecounter! by Daath · · Score: 4, Funny

    That is wierd and funny! Now I've typed 57... No 66... No 75... No 84... Eeeerh, 98... DAMN nevermind...

    --
    Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
  3. About the cold fusion claims. by Dthoma · · Score: 4, Funny
    "...new research shows that the collapsing bubbles' temperatures fall a bit short of that needed for fusion."

    Hands up if you saw this coming from the start.

    --

    Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".

    1. Re:About the cold fusion claims. by ErikTheRed · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shit, I'm just happy I no longer have to fear my girlfriend accidentally vaporizing the city when she takes a bubble bath.

      --

      Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
  4. About the keystroke counting by Dthoma · · Score: 5, Funny
    Just had a look at Project Dolphin's top typers. Someone called "magictiti" has typed 24,535,976 keystrokes since he began on 31st May. That's 56 days in all, with 438,142 keystrokes a day.

    This person has been typing an average of 305 keystrokes a minute since May 31.

    THAT'S 5.1 KEYSTROKES A SECOND, NON STOP, FOR TWO MONTHS.

    And you thought that you didn't have a life.

    --

    Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".

    1. Re:About the keystroke counting by magictiti · · Score: 4, Funny
      > Just had a look at Project Dolphin's top typers. Someone called "magictiti" has typed 24,535,976 keystrokes since he began on 31st May. That's 56 days in all, with 438,142 keystrokes a day.

      > This person has been typing an average of 305 keystrokes a minute since May 31.

      > THAT'S 5.1 KEYSTROKES A SECOND, NON STOP, FOR TWO MONTHS.

      > And you thought that you didn't have a life.

      Actually, most of that time was spenth replying to slashdot posts. I copy the entire message by hand first before I begin to write. You'd be amazed what you're capable of when you don't try to spellcheck, grammar check, or anything-proof your typing.

      -magictiti
      It's all in the wrist.

  5. I Have To Hand It To Slashdot... by istartedi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...having the guts to post stories about alternatives to CVS, when their parent company (VA Software) has a CVS-based product (SourceForge) as one of their few apparent streams of revenue.

    Could this perhaps be stealth R&D for SourceForge 4.0, which might perhaps act as a front-end for all types of source maintenance tools? Given VA's past record, they're not apt to be that savvy. Perhaps Taco et. al. are just trying to convince upper management that they need to do something Real Soon Now. Perhaps they desire to have said higher powers become so disgusted with /. that they will decide to sell it to someone like Salon or NYT so that the editorial staff can finally become real journalists like they always wanted.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    1. Re:I Have To Hand It To Slashdot... by dthable · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If VA was smart they would figure out ways to take the CVS code, make it modular and sell modules for source control systems other than CVS. Not everyone is going to use CVS just because SourceForge requires it.

      First, CVS is quite limited to what can be done with it. A lot of third party tools like PVCS and ClearCase provide a lot of GUI enhancements that make working with the products easier. And other systems, like Perforce and Bitkeeper really give developers a lot of control over concurrent development. CVS was a great idea to RCS, but now, it rates right up their with Visual Source Safe.

      We looked at using SourceForge where I work. Basically, since we didn't use CVS or have a need for the mailing list features, we only saw value to the bug tracker, task list and document section. The document section of SourceForge is very simple so it didn't buy us anything more than posting pages in HTML. Why would we pay for it. Now, if they could develop nice web based stuff like tinderbox for different source control systems, we would buy it hands down.

  6. Advice for Tom Lord by Stephen+VanDahm · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system . . . needs some monetary help."

    He should just make a website or something.

    Steve

  7. Little Timmy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Little Timmy has a terminal disease. But a large corporation has pledged to donate $0.000000000000001 to fulfill Little Timmy's (TM)for every keystroke you make wish. You help by typing 23 hours a day, leaving a book over your keyboard,etc.

  8. thanks for the press, slashdot by tomlord · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am grateful to supporters for the purchases and contributions received so far.

    I'm still a rather far from having enough to stay on-line, but the contributions so far suggest that there is a chance.

    The problems faced by arch aren't unique. Whenever I've talked to those more senior engineers who are my friends and who have lots of "open source" involvement, they say "We're hearing this same sad story from a large number of very talented hackers.".

    The botttom line: please do contribute to arch. It really is a fiscal emergency and your support is much appreciated. But in addition to sending support, please also send a short, polite note to your favorite budgeted manager or exec at an open source or free software friendly company. Point out to them that you are doing their job and spending money in a way that will benefit them. Ask them to be more proactive in supporting free software researchers, including working on their host organizations to establish some winning policies in this regard.

    1. Re:thanks for the press, slashdot by lm · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm the CEO of BitMover, we produce BitKeeper, an SCM tool which has some similarities to Arch. We're quite a bit farther along, we're 5+ years old and have a fairly large team, so I have some idea of what it takes to turn something like Arch into a real product from what it is today, which is more of a work of charity or altruism.

      We've been taken to task here and elsewhere for not making BitKeeper be open source. This is a reasonable opportunity for us to explain why we haven't done so.

      Tom's managed to raise $10K this year in support of all of his fine projects, arch being only one of them. We're not trying to do everything he is doing, all we do is source management. The problem is that we spend $10K every day or so in salaries. And we are dramatically understaffed compared to any other SCM company, when they figure out how small our engineering staff is they are amazed that we are able to do what we do.

      The reality is that we should be at more like $100K per day in salaries to really have a good product. The problem is that all you lovely slashdot folks want to get everything for free. And you'll insist on it if you can get away with it. Given that the SCM market is so small, the only way to get the money for the salaries is if you have a product which is based on IP and requires people to pay for it. Face it, if we gave BitKeeper away for free but asked you to support us with "donations" not one of you would do so. Remember, Tom is a really bright guy doing really nice work and he's managed to gather all of $10K this year. Which we spend in a day or two. And we're also really bright people doing really nice work, but that doesn't mean you'll give us or him money.

      The point is that certain market spaces simply don't work based on the tradition open source support style model. That model works great for things where there is a huge market and the product is broken so you can ask for support and people will want to pay for it. That model fails completely if you ever provide a product which works. It also fails if the market is small.

      The point is that if you want Arch to succeed, encourage Tom to make it a closed source product and get some funding and create a business. Anything less is a joke in poor taste. It's great to imagine that you'll get all your problems solved for free, but that's just not going to happen.

      It's not what you want to hear but I can't help that. If any of you can show how to support the salary cost it actually takes to support a product like Arch/Subversion/BitKeeper/whatever with an open source business model, we'll happily do so. We would like it much better if we could. As far as we can tell, we can't and we can also see that Tom can't either. Prove us wrong. Show us how. We'd love be shown that we don't understand. Just make sure that you show up with $100,000/day rather than $40/day which is what Tom is raising.

  9. Isn't dual-licensing with the GPL perfect for this by joneshenry · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I do not understand the problem with funding the projects on Tom Lord's web site if the projects have the value claimed for them. The projects appear to be licensed under the GPL. There are GPLed libraries such as hackerlab and there are GPLed programs such as arch. Supposedly arch is being used by several commercial projects. The copyright is held I would guess by one person, Tom Lord, so he would be free to dual-license it for commercial use.

    Perhaps the problem is the overinsistence on advertising the products as free software as opposed to advertising them as useful products that can be licensed, for a price, at whatever terms the buyer wishes. The problem appears similar to that solved by Sleepycat.

    The claims of hackerlab and arch are that they are technically superior solutions to important subareas of computer science. This is precisely what Sleepycat claims for Berkeley DB. As a GPLed library, hackerlab already qualifies as a product that cannot be used commercially unless the distributor wishes to distribute the source code for the application under the GPL. If hackerlab really has value, that ought to be enough to pry some money to continue its support. Similar considerations should apply to arch if it was designed properly.

    I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.