How to Go About Team Building?

B1-66ER asks: "I'm trying build a team of elite overclockers for HWLogic, and a group of developers for our mulit-platform benchmark CPU-XMark. Now, before you tell me to use SF's Project Help Wanted, just remember: Linus Torvalds didn't have the online community development tools that we use now. I'd like to go beyond the help of SourceForge [which is part of the same company as Slashdot] to ultimately create my own organization in the way that Linus has now. It is my goal to one day get CPU-XMark to be a multi-platform Open Source clone of Futuremark's 3DMark05. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Clone wars

[HalWasRight]

It is my goal to one day get CPU-XMark to be a multi-platform Open Source clone of Futuremark's 3DMark05. Any suggestions?

How about something more exciting than a clone of something comercial. Nothing attracts good developers better than a good project. Try "A better, more applicable, less biased, multi platform benchmark."

Ummmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Lessee -- right now you have nothing, your goal is to clone an existing, highly specific product and you want to know how to be as big as Linux? My advice is to calm down, write some code, and if you have a good project (and you obviously have a flair for self-promotion) the developers will join.

Right now, you have delusions of grandeur of Eric Raymond proportions, and even he mostly just gets ridiculed for it nowadays.

USENET.

[diamondmagic]

Really all I think Linus used is USENET, mailing lists, etc (A bit of luck dosn't hurt, too).

Re:USENET.

[Leroy_Brown242]

Being the right person in the right place at the right time, makes all the difference. There are plenty of smarter people, with better ideas, that have done a nose dive and faded from the internet.

let's count up the score

[mkavanagh2]

• vaporware project
• placeholder homepage
• bizarre aspirations to be linus torvalds
• discounting a good answer for frivolous reasons
• crap question

result: another awesome ASK SLASHDOT. As they say in Enemy Territory:
v56

Re:let's count up the score

[afabbro]

Agreed! Worst. Ask Slashdot. Ever!

OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Write an operating system!

Clone wars-Emperor Hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that 3DMark had help from hardware manufacturers in order to build their tool.

Kevin Costner applies to Slashdot

[heinousjay]

Build it, and they will come.

Provided it doesn't suck tremendouns donkey balls.

Re:Kevin Costner applies to Slashdot

[Leroy_Brown242]

I thought that was a feature!!

Domain issues

[neclimdul]

I'd say first would be not to use enom... when I saw hwlogic.com not showing up I did some research on the "extended RGP" thing and found other people with this problem. Is this legal?

I have a suggestion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's more of a request. CLEAN UP THE GODDAMN BASEMENT!!! I'VE ASKED YOU 100 TIMES!!!

Sincerely,
Your Mom

PS You can play computer club later, it's time for dinner. Your salsbury steak awaits.

RMS says...

[dcapel]

Technically, thats GNU/CPU-XMark.

You just have to know where to look

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago an elite hacker unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These geeks promptly escaped the maximum security stockade and fled to the internet underground....Today, still wanted by the government and the RIAA, they survive as hackers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and you can find them, maybe you can hire.....THE GHEY TEAM.

Re:You just have to know where to look

[lpcustom]

Best laugh I've had all week.

I agree

[TubeSteak]

Hmm... I went to the sourceforge site and now I have to revise my comments

Project LX is the codename for HWLogic.com's upcoming open source system benchmark. Project LX will be a highly compatible benchmark suite which will allow users to benchmark nearly every aspect of their system.

Development Status: 1 - Planning

Intended Audience: Advanced End Users, System Administrators

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Operating System: All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), Linux

Programming Language: C, Pascal

User Interface: OpenGL, Win32 (MS Windows), X Window System (X11)

You should spend some time lurking in various tech forums & review sites to get a full picture of 3DMark's limitations. (Just about every hardware site I've ever bothered to read has gone into each new iteration of 3DMark & looked at its flaws.

Mods, please don't smack me down for this, but the submitter might want to consider not making the entire package OSS. ATI & nVidia both have a history of "optimizating" drivers and if they have complete access to the program's source... well, I can't imagine they wouldn't use that to their max advantage.

'luck

Re:I agree

[forkazoo]

I disagree with you about not making it open source. If it becomes popular, nVidia and ATi will try to optimise for it, regardless of what it is. Closing the source won't help with that. Closing the source would just make me less inclined to trust the benchmarks, because I don't have any way of knowing what it is really doing, or how I should expect it to sompare to my own apps.

Besides, most of the graphics code for benchmarking should be fairly optimal anyway. You don't need to turn on a bunch of extra stuff to make your screenshots prettier. You just need to stuff polygons into the hardware, and see how long it takes.

That said, I really would like to see a sort of SPECshader which compares glsl shading performance for cards. Unlike CPU and general GFX benchmarks, I'm much less ure how that should work, or what I want from it. It would be very difficult to make a fair benchmark, and more plausible to be effected by driver optimisations. (ATI can't control the code generation that made your executable for the benchmark, but the driver gets glsl source to compile on its own, and has pretty much got free reign with it!)

Funny,

[mrselfdestrukt]

Strange that I am reading this while sitting at work. The rest of the freaking company are on a teambuild enjoying game drives, lunches, outdoor activities like quad biking etc... while I have to stay at the office and handle emergencies and stuff.
I thought this was about tembuilding activities in the relaxed sense.

Instructional video

[hey!]

I vaguely remember seeing an instructional video on just this topic from a Japanese expert on this stuff -- Akira Kuroyama or Kakagawa something like that.

In a nutshell:

• Forward momentum is important, which means you'll have to get started before you've settled on the team.
  
• Be opportunistic; keep an eye out for talent and when you see somebody who'd be an asset invite them on.
  
• Look for technical talent, because you'll need somebody you can rely on in a tight place. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that everyone has to be superstar, in fact it's probably counterproductive: a team full of prima donnas is less than the sum of its parts. Keep interpersonal dynamics in mind and don't hesitate to hire somebody who's a bit mediocre technically if he helps the team operate more smoothly.
  
• Remember that in the end, it always coems down to blood and guts in the pouring rain.
  

I think you can probably get the video from Netflix; it's called "The Seven Samurai".

Code

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the same thing a million times. Somebody thinks up something they want, they start a Sourceforge project, and wonder why people don't flock to it.

Open source projects get nowhere if they are presented to the world as a good idea. It's working code that is vital to an open-source project, not good ideas.

I visited your Sourceforge project page. It's listed as being in the "planning" stage. There's a binary download, but I wouldn't touch some random executable you've provided. There's a source download, but it can't be extracted with GNU tar. I visited your homepage, and was greeted by a generic "domain registered" page.

I actually went further than typical people would, and still I found nothing of value - just an "I want". Why should I contribute to that? Show us the code.

Teambuilding

[metamatic]

Everything I know about team building I learned from David Brent.

Just remember that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue.

My advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a young man hide just inside the entrance to a building and attack anyone who enters with a bokken. If a prospective candidate gets bonked on the head, don't ask him to join. If he defends himself effectively, ask him if he wants to help protect poor villagers agains marauding thieves in return for some rice and a place to stay. Worked in Seven Samurai.

You might want to try...

[Sockatume]

...posting on Slashdot asking how to gather people for your project. That way you'd basically get a big, free "help wanted" ad on an incredibly popular tech site.

...

You sly devil, you. ;)