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Zen and the Art of Apache Maintenance
SilentBob4 writes "Apache recently held a week-end "infrathon" to sweep the dust out of the corners, squash a few old bugs, drink a wee bit of ale (maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit) and get their hands dirty with the Zen of maintaining their infrastructure. MadPenguin.org crashed the party in search of the secrets of getting into the "zone" while peeking into the grittiest of the nitty gritty with one of the darling projects of open source, Apache." From the article: "The guys that I interviewed were among some of the brightest minds in open source; Brian Behlendorf; Upayavira; Greg Stein; and Roy Fielding, all of whom are well known and regarded (or deserve to be). These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires, but instead flew thousands of miles to sit slouching on couches and squatting on cushions hacking infrastructure maintenance for free, primarily just to hang out with each other, even though they could have done the same thing on line."
Does FireFox crash for anyone else when you click that link? Or is it just me?
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
The OP said "If you put a quarter in the cup [...] you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates". The assertion seemed to me to be orders of magnitude out of whack, so I decided to do a quick and dirty verification. That was the entire point of my post.
It's not difficult to do a back of the envelope calculation before posting. It's not difficult to do at least a perfunctory check of your facts (Google is your friend!) before posting. I know that's Slashdot, but still, this gleeful indifference to facts annoys me a lot (must be my engineer brain).
Of course, if you're living at poverty level, donating even a small percentage of your income is painful. My example was however really contrived: I tried to give the OP the benefit of all possible doubt, and forced all assumptions in his favor.
If however we consider a more reasonable example, say somebody who makes $50000 an year and eats once a month at McDonalds, we end up with a donation of 3 bucks/year, a percentage of 0.006 % of the income. I don't really see it as a sacrifice - certainly not one that allows the OP to pretend to any moral superiority over Gates who donated "only" 27 billions.