Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

phreakuencies writes "The ChangeLog in slackware-current got a distiguished update today on Jan 22: Patrick Volkerding updated us on his health condition stating he is not back in perfect shape but getting more medical tests and results. The initial phrase on the ChangeLog: 'I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.' Read up here"

Comments

Benevolent Dictator Attitude

[vladd_rom]

I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.

Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.

However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".

Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization?

Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.

Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share holder value or else). When the inefficiencies of corporations have diminished (as a result of competition) then paradoxically, there's less of a place for people in those corporations that are in any other business than making money. I note that very few people are in that business. People instead seem to insist to cling on to old fashioned ideas and outmoded values such as behaving morally (instead of lawfully), programming computers (instead of maximising profit or minimising cost), increasing their skills for self satisfaction (instead of doing a cost benefit analysis) etc. etc.

I think you point to an interesting dilemma in that of course a thousand man corporation can't just be expected to go belly up and die just because one guy walks home and takes the blue prints with him. For no other reason than that that isn't exactly fair to the other 999 guys (or gals) working there. On the other hand, in order to address this the pressure today is 100% on making everybody completely replacable, that's how economy works, instead of finding a balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.

With the world (through globalisation) becoming ever more efficient, the pace increasing and the people in it not changing much, it'll be interesting where and how it all will end. It's clear that it cannot just continue on the road it's on now, we'll hit the end sooner or later, we can't all end up worker bees with one (or three) queen(s) on top. Can we?

From TFA...

[md81544]

So, this verson is going to be wrapped up pretty quickly. I hope people
will support the release, because I'm sure I'll have a lot more bills before
all of this is through, and I'm blowing through what little money I've managed
to save.

This struck me... I use Slack on two *really slow* PCs (233 Mhz) and it makes them perform just fine. And yet I've never paid Pat a dime. I think it's time I started a subscription. What about you?

Mental health ChangeLogs

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope the guy doesn't die soon, Slackware has been the only Linux distribution I ever really liked. Anyway, Pat's ChangeLog gave me an idea, what if most developers kept mental health ChangeLogs? Mhlogs!

Re:Ok, flame away...

[jwdb]

Well, that's the idea behind OS - people willingly giving away the product of their mind for others to benefit from. The idea is to expand the common pool of ideas and tools and to do something you enjoy, with the bonus of giving something back to the community.

Compare programmers to artists. You've got your traditional artist (software company) selling his paintings (products) retaining all rights. On the other side you've got the graffiti artists (OS programmers) painting murals on the city walls - everyone is free to enjoy their work. Of course, anyone can sell photos of the work, so it's more along the lines of BSD than Linux, but nobody is obliged to pay to view the original work...

Jw

Health status : Finally !

[DrYak]

This guy got finally reasonnable. Instead of trying to take care of by himself, he finally went to a doctor, and, best part : Stayed with the same doctor

Of cours, any doctor usually start thinking of the most plausible and statistically significant cause of disease. Usually patient should come back and only if no improvement has been seen, then only the doctors start considering more unlikely or rarer diseases.
But if the patient is unhappy with the first diagnosis of the first doctor and moves to another doctor, the new will start over again from the very beginning.

It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.

BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors. He should try to stay with one (and eventually have him refer to other colleauges if he need more help).
Because each time a patient siwtch doctors, he loose time because of this start-over-again.

And I'm not speaking about the economical problems : doctor switching reases the health cost a lot because a lot of things (lab exams, etc...) are done twice or thrice.
It's a big problem we have here in Switzerland.

There's some work to avoid this kind of redundancy : One exemple of such project in Geneva (CH) is e-toile (Sorry website in french, you have some english info here).
We hope that by building secured networks, doctors could share some information and avoid repeating the same stuffs all over again.

Re:Health status : Finally !

[DarkTempes]

you really don't understand the current state of medical doctors in the states then...

most don't CARE about every looking for the obscure. they're good at taking care of the low end stuff (a one week virus, a cold) with advice or some small medication, and the high end immediate life threatening stuff (surgery, cancer) but if it comes to some obscure middle-ranged life degrading disease or problem they tend to just do their normal battery of blood tests and then say "you're fine, it's all in your head!"

and so then you must do doctor shopping.
you think people like wasting their time and money utterly with a doctor? they just HAVE to. and they tend to self-diagnose cause the doctor doesn't do his job and diagnose you himself. the medical profession is one of the few BUISNESS professions where you PAY MONEY and are not guarenteed RESULTS of ANY KIND.

I did the whole game, went around for two years with NMH [neurally mediated hypotension] before a cardiologist finally diagnosed me and gave me the proper medicine. First went to my primary care physican, she was just like "yes i know your life sucks and you're losing tons of weight and you look like you're dying but i have no clue so go elsewhere!" and that was basically the same thing, either they didn't know and they didn't care or they just wanted me to see a psych professional (which i saw many of and they all said i was just fine mentally for a person in my condition)
it's easy to judge something until it actually happens to you...
</rant>

Re:Health status : Finally !

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mildly off topic, but I'll back you up on a recent experience of mine. I've had some intense sinus pressure on the right side of my face, but no pain. My normal GP (who has served me well) dismissed it initially, but after 8 months did little more than keep offering me decongestants. They didn't really help. We stepped through a few other options, including ear infections and a course of antibiotics. Still nothing. A few times I asked the guy if he could just take a look up my nose, it *felt* like there was something there, on the right hand side.

He wouldn't, just told me it would be fine, it's nothing to worry about.

That leads me to poke around with a pair of tweezers up my nose - you know, it's really surprising how much space you have back there if you really concentrate while you're prodding about, to see what is where.

After a couple of attempts I latched onto something that didn't give any feedback of belonging to me - I couldn't feel the tweezing, and it didn't hurt. Giving it a tug I felt a *big* pressure change in my sinus, and pulled slowly. Out came what has to be the filthiest thing from my head. Two and a half inches long, dark green/brown and stained with a little blood on the end, it was close to the consistency of a pencil eraser in parts, moving to the consistency of jello at one end.

Then came the draining. Gack. What looked like 2 tablespoons of pus ran from my nose, which honestly made me feel physically ill. I like squeezing a zit as much as the next person, but this was just a bit much.

Anyway, after an hour I felt awesome. no more pressure on the side of my face, and I swear my eyes focus a little better than they did before. I took the gel-lump into my doctor, told him what it was, how it happened, how it had fixed all the sinus pressure I'd been having.

He didn't think that was the problem.

Go figure. My situation wasn't problematic. I wasn't in pain, I didn't have any long term damage to my health, but still a doctor when presented with symptoms and requests from a patient and ignores them, even when the final cause is discovered isn't someone to keep around, so I changed docs and told him why. Give each doc a good go at solving a problem, but if they insist on sticking on a point that really doesn't feel right, do change.

Someone got sick

[Anonymous Coward]

In my prior work we were doing customisation work on our companys own product. Most customisation was done my team of 1 Programmer, (1/3)Project Manager and (1/2)Grapician. Sometimes Pm and graphician being the same person. Programmer was generally doing one project at time. Project manager was managing 2 or 3 and graphician was doing mostly one at time, but was resereved only for hald of the time for a project. Typical project lasted 2 months. Getting specification and connectons from client has half the work.

Employees got sick once in a while like people do.

There was allways the trouble to explain customers.

The usual question was. Why have you not replaced him(her). Our project is prime importance.

a) 25 some will most likely be sick 2 days, geting new programmer to understand takes longer.

b) Puting people in middle of half written code that does not do what is needed, usually means large chunks being rewritten, when original author knows what is missing and only adds that.

c) a lot of specification was usually on the air, and doing the code to interface was the minor part.

d) We sure did not have spare developers.

e) Yes, they all are.

Re:What are you talking about?

[m50d]

I think Debian and Gentoo are the obvious alternatives. Slackware people tend to compile a lot of their own stuff anyway since the default distribution is a bit light on the packages (no OOo for example), and there's a very nice port of emerge to slackware. Debian is quite slack-like but may be too political for many slackers.

Re:What are you talking about?

[tzanger]

I've been using Slackware since it diverged from SLS so many years ago and I'd have to say that you are 100% correct about Debian... nice idea but if I wanted politics, I'd tune in to CSPAN. Their rabid use of GNU/everything has utterly and totally turned me off of the distribution. Gentoo? I don't think so. I think that I'd move to something like Vector Linux which is Slackware based and has a more sensible set of installer defaults (I use my own tagsets though already). The only real reason I'm not using Vector currently is because the ASCII art penguin has to go for starters but more importantly, Slackware is still the 'root' of it and why go with a little offshoot that doesn't change much at the current time?

Re:What are you talking about?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

I have thought of that for one machine of mine (the firewall/proxy), but there is always that one problem: Linux simply supports far more hardware than any BSD variant. Linux hardware support used to be a major issue, now it is almost a given.

Funny, someone here on /. suggested a couple of years back that Linux would one day be mainstream and 'Uncool', and that people would migrate to BSD. I thought they were joking . . .

Re:Ok, flame away...

[teromajusa]

I doubt it. The US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country. Almost 3x as much per person as the UK. See here.

Re:Ok, flame away...

[LardBrattish]

Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
And the oink oink noises from the trough became deafening.
By definition a public owned system will be more "efficient" than private because it is not obliged to take money out of the system for the shareholders - unless you genuinely believe that all of the shareholders will put all of their profits back into your country - duh!!! It may not make a profit because the government may choose to distribute the money in a particular way e.g. running a privatised steel industry at a loss to subsidise the manufacturing sector.