Slashdot Mirror
Intel Chief Evangelist Comments on Linux Scheduler
ByeByeWintel writes "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a
recent interview on Devx.com he stated: 'If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads ... There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the 'running of applications' interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go).'"
If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads
Yeah, a lot of us feel the same way about the fancy-dressing guys that work over in the sales office.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I hear Intel has some engineers who you could get to implement this. If you don't completely botch it, you might even get it into Linus' tree.
It's Free Software, you can add whatever you want.
How we know is more important than what we know.
James doesn't seem to acknowledge that such features already exist in Linux as well. Additionally Linux has __FAR__ better support of NUMA system management. Many Opteron-based systems are NUMA as well as many high end Intel-based servers. Is he just oblivious?
Resume your regularly scheduled Con vs Ingo flamewar.
I scheduled an interview with linux a while back. It was all like, "LINE UP", and I was like, "WUT?", and it was like, "What's your priority?", but I was all like, "interupt, bitch", and it was like, "cool, SWAP", and I was all like, "I'm in ur processor, executin' my code".
An 'Evangelist' is this instance is someone who is a promoter, not a follower. So you are wrong on that count as well as the already noted 'site' 'sight' thing. You might want to steer away from criticizing others for a while...
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
And I'm gonna tell ya... I'm gonna tell all the people here-a, that the Lord has come... Amen! Yes indeed, and the Glorious Pentium IV has arrive-ed! Praise be to Pentium! And lo, the sheep of the field will line down-a with the process, and the thread-a will be managed by the application!
Oh, don't be fooled by the Devil... No-a! AMD is the sign of the Beast-a! And he shall be cast out of heaven! Raise-a your hands to the heavens and press CTRL-ALT-DELETE!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh, until the second page, which I didn't see.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Nope, you complainers got it backwards. This is a tech expert in his area, saying that he would want OS developrs - which he is not - do change their ways. Being the expert that he is, he is very much entitled to say that. What's more, he would still be entitled to say that even if he were in charge of the OS. Note that he doesn't say: "go out and do it for me because I'm lazy and don't want to pay". For all we know, he might be busy pulling "evangelical" levers to get it done at Intel and we are just observing one of those levers in action. Besides, he said "OS" not "Linux". It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Linux is not the only OS in the world.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Try Robert Love's "run" command... Processes can be started or moved to any CPU or collection of CPUs.
Not only is it obvious that the submitter didn't read the article but by posting it its obvious that the 'editor' didn't either! Jebus! It's about a library template that Intel provides to developers! Linux gets a passing mention on the second page but other than that coincidence the writeup has nothing to do with the real article! And then there are people tagging the article as 'clueless' - I hope they meant the submitter because if they meant the article then ironically they would have been showing their own 'cluelessness'. /.'s integrity btw even though I've seen more articles fly-by that shouldn't have over the years.
This is the first time I've felt a need to complain about
Shh.
Now, don't go blaming the beer! It's only doing what God created it to do.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the beers?
First of all, any job with the word 'evangelist' directly implies 'highly paid fanboy.'
I worked with the Evangelists in Apple Developer Relations, and my direct personal experience tells me that you're full of shit.
Apple's Technology Evangelists are some of the most talented technical marketing professionals I've ever met, and now that I'm an outside developer, they do a great job for me pulling the levers and turning the gears that I need to get my products out the door, connecting our company with customer prospects, and finding and introducing us to other companies that we can collaborate with. I'd hire any of those guys in a heartbeat for either a development or a marketing position, if I could get them out of Apple.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think that what Intel's Evangelist wants is already available through standard POSIX pthreads and the POSIX-RT extensions.
man pset_create, pset_assign, or pset_bind.
I just checked and it seems that Solaris, HP-UX support this POSIX feature. Maybe it's only Linux that is non-standard: I found ythis quote: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/solaris_linux_app.html
"Both Linux and the Solaris OS support the notion of binding a process or thread to a processor. Linux allows binding to a set of processors for non-exclusive use of those processors. The Solaris OS allows binding to a set of processors for exclusive use, (that is, CPU fencing), but does not allow binding to a group for non-exclusive use (except via Solaris Zones?). Linux does not have a mechanism for CPU fencing, though implementations can be found on the web (see, for example, the CPUSETS for Linux page on the bullopensource.org site). The Linux system calls that are processor affinity based are sched_setaffinity(2) and sched_getaffinity(2)."
what is being discussed is called "scheduler activations" within the CS community (or was). its an old idea. i did some work on a real-world (hah) implemention back in the early 1990's when i worked at UWashington. google it. Solaris actually added this design at least 10 years ago (plus or minus 2 years). its a very cool OS design, but can also be hard to get the implementation right; it also requires both kernel and userspace implementations.
the basic idea is that the kernel doesn't try to decide which threads within a task/process should run. as long as the process is scheduled to have access to a CPU, whenever its about to block (e.g. on disk i/o) or to be granted a processor from another task, the kernel tells the user space scheduler what is going on. scheduling is then done in user space, where maximal knowledge about the applications internal design and thread priorities can be easily accessed.
there are several papers on this design, ranging from Tom Anderson's "original" through reports on various implementation efforts. it was certainly fun trying to write a user space context switch routine that has to be reentrant itself, not to mention trying to deal with priority inversion issues. i think sun simply worked around the latter problem with some design assumptions/limitations, but i don't know for sure.
Apple's Technology Evangelists are some of the most talented technical marketing professionals I've ever met
Wait a minute, is that a compliment or an insult?!?
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I should point out that SGI has done exactly this: on behalf of their customers they go about fixing scalability problems in Linux. The results are quite interesting -- eight thousand CPU computers and the like. To give credit to the Evanglist, perhaps he was hoping coworkers and superiors at Intel would recognize the need and step up.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Meh. I don't speak for anyone else. I speak for myself. I say if you have a need for feature X then add it. If you're not willing to invest the time (or money) to make feature X more than a "gee, I wish" request then you don't really have a *need* for it. As for this "We believe this is something everyone could and should use" crap, for a start, I don't speak for anyone but myself, and I think Free Software is something a lot of people can find a use for, and if you can't, then don't use it. If, however, you just meant that end users might have a need for feature X but they're unable or unwilling to make that feature a reality, well, that's what the commercial distros are for. Go nag your Redhat representative.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sorry, but the "Do it yourself," attitude is just bad. Even assuming it is directed at the extremely small segment of the population that has the level of programming knowledge required (usually it isn't) that then assumes that they have nothing better to do with their time. Sorry, not how it works.
On the other hand, there is no shortage of people complaining that a feature that they want is not present in a piece of software, yet expect someone else to write it for them. Or demanding "Linux isn't ready for the enterprise, now someone go develop features X, Y, and Z to appease me".
I think the angle is that they are a large company with many developers who are quite capable of implementing such a thing, should they wish. I viewed QuantumG's comment in a much more positive light- as in "because the source is open, you can add whatever new features you want!" rather than "nick off, do it yourself". I found the comment neither arrogant, nor elitist, nor representative of such.
Well, sure. 'ls' gives you a catalog of files on the disk, while 'cat' lists one or more of the files' contents. But Windows' 'dir' is much harder to remember - it just means "Drrr, I wonder what's in this folder?"
You expect every fucking suggestion to be implemented? If not then what DO you suggest? The developers simply say that they are going to do X, if you want to do Y then you need to do it yourself. You can't implement every bloody possible feature in the damn universe, which is apparently what you want. Instead they implement what they think meets their own goals. They claim that this is enough to work for everyone. It isn't perfect for everyone but NOTHING ever is, if someone wants a feature desperately they either need to implement it themselves or find someone else to do it.
Surely I'm not the only one who didn't see any mention of linux in the summary, and clicked the article and did a search for linux/nix only to find nothing?
Would a virtualization layer fulfill this? VMware's ESX is essentially an OS in itself so it has schedulers that schedule VMs, which is a lot like processes. Inside the VM, the guest OS then schedule its own processes. So maybe the answer is to write and ship application inside virtual appliances. This is just me pondering.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Indeed, and surely a comment that encourages the poster to get involved in the project (i.e. the Linux kernel) and explore their ideas of where it should change is the opposite of elitist. Elitist would be "it's good enough already, and it's not your project so push off or else".
It's easy to be an Apple Evangelists. Look what Apple has done with Intel chips. Cool notebooks, great workstations and even the X-serve trumps similar servers using the same chips from Intel. They design everything better! Look at the similar servers: IBM servers are what you would expect IBM servers to be, solid, expensive and well serviced. Dell and HP servers are almost what IBM's are, but less expensive. Apple makes better servers, but the OS keeps their market numbers low, even though you can run other operating systems, directly or as virtual machines. Sun's Sunfire servers may be a better buy, they are well designed, solid, well serviced, less expensive and I think they are faster at this point in time, but they are not using the Intel chips. Does AMD even have Evangelist's?
Ok, this is a knee jerk response from someone not reading the article yet, so forgive me in that regard. I was to understand from someone else that every thread in Linux is actually a separate process and therefore carries with it a performance hit for multi-threaded applications VS say BSD systems. Thats second hand information from a Sun developer who thought it was a terrible idea.
Yes, but if you have to pay someone to make the modifications you want done, and then pay them to maintain those modifications and to port them whenever something they interface with randomly changes, then you've got cost, probably quite substantial cost. If you're going to pay a quite substantial cost for redevelopment, and you aren't going to make modifications yourself you may as well get a close source product and pay the company to make the modifications that you want them to make.
That's not realistic for most people or companies.
For people it is twofold. The first is not knowing even how to go about it. You really think a non-technical user knows how to go about having software or features written? Hardly. They wouldn't know who to hire. The second problem is one of money. I'd love to have a nice OSS audio/video editor written. Basically I'd like to have most of Sony's Vegas and some of Cakewalk's Sonar. That's be just great, I'd even be willing to pay. The problem is I wouldn't be willing to pay enough. I'd be willing and able to pay, at most, the cost of both of those packages. Unfortunately, I know the scale of such a project and I realise you are talking probably 6-7 figures for development assuming you want it done well (which I would). I'm afraid I can't swing that. Also I'd only want to pay on contingency, as in I have ot like the results. I can't afford to pony up my cash for something that might not work out, not when there are alternatives out there that I know work.
As such it is extremely unfeasible to expect people to pay for development of OSS. They haven't the knowledge or the money to do so.
So what about business? Well there the money is available, if it needs to be (at least for large enough businesses) and the knowledge should be as businesses should be able to research things they need. However there you run in to lack of reason. So let's say I need a package like this for my company. I decide to have one made and pay a lot of cash for it. Why should I let any of you have it then? Either it is something that helps me do business better, in which case I should keep it to myself to get an edge over competitors, or it is something that's marketable, so I should sell it. In either case, having spent the money and thus getting to dictate the terms, there's no real reason to open it to the world.
That's the problem. It is just unreasonable to expect people to want to pay for things like this especially since one of the big talking points I see for free software is how it's cheaper.
You just shouldn't tell people to "DYI" or "Buy DYI." Those that can and want to will. I mean I've yet to meet someone that said "What, you mean because I have the source I can use my programming skills to modify it? Shit I never knew." Those that want to, do, hence we have the OSS we do. However, if you want it as the mainstream, dominant stuff, those that don't have to be respected.
I don't want to write a video editor, I can't I don't have the skill and I'm not interested in spending the time. However I want a good one. I'm willing to pay only as much as I have to (or I suppose I should say my employer is) which is about $500 in this case. If that isn't sufficient funds, and if you aren't will to have them ex post facto, then I'm afraid the commercial solution is more attractive.
That's just how it goes with most people. You tell them you'll give them a perfect Office replacement for free, they are interested. You tell them they can have Office for free if they are willing to put in thousands of hours of work modifying OO code to make it that way, or paying big dollars to a team to do it, they will just go buy Office.
>Sorry, but the "Do it yourself," attitude is just bad.
It's great. That's what open source is all about.
>Part of having a successful product is listening to what people want and working to implement that.
Ah I see where you got confused.
Linux is not a product. It's already successful.
evil is as evil does
An interesting point. I would say he's definitely trying to get someone to step up, and Intel does have the people who could do just that... (be good for the multi-core market)
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Fair enough. If you try to switch to Linux and discover it doesn't have what you need then go back.
As for considering people's ideas, yeah, great, developers do that, all the time. The problem is when the developer says "look, it won't work" and the people harp on about how right they are. That's often when the DIY attitude comes out, because nothing says "you were wrong" like running code.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Open source isn't necessarily priceless. Education, talent, and time are still scarce resources. Open source just provides hired hands a platform for their interests and spare time, and a shared base to work from. If you're in IT for cheap labor, I still encourage you to look to offshore.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
> And this, ladies and gentleman, is why all Linux users are perceived as elitist, arrogant bastards.
You are right. The way free software works is that if you want something done, you either do it yourself, or you pay somebody to do it for you.
Somehow, this has become at odds with mainstream society. People have come to expect that if you want something done, you whine about it for long enough, and someone else will do it for you.
It is a society of builders and whiners.
I know which side I'm on.
You won't be the first to try. You'll might end up about like Technocrat, with most stories getting only a handful of comments.
P.S. I'll take the overs on the 'out by the end of October' part.
Yep - and where's Dirk? Wasn't he supposed to be Intel's Chief Linux Strategist or something?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Most marketing people are not technical professionals. That's not the case at Apple. Phil Schiller doesn't mention it very often, but he started his career writing code.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>Sorry, but the "Do it yourself," attitude is just bad.
It's great. That's what open source is all about.
I think you misunderstand what "'do it yourself' attitude" meant there. I think the original poster meant to say "'If you don't like it, go write a better one, or quit whining, goddamn it' attitude".
Asking people to contribute things is good; using contributability (if that's a word) as an excuse to ignore valid criticism is bad.
most talented technical marketing professional = highly paid fanboy (or girl)
How would you be marketing a stuff you are not a fan of?
And don't tell me Apple doesn't pay well its most talented technical professionals!
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
1: Where does iut say that Intel is demanding a bunch of volunteers to do their dirty work?
2: How do you know what Intel is doing? Do you work for them? Or do you at least work with them on such topics? Or do you at the very least work in the same area (I personally did so until a little over a year ago)?
3: Why should they at all cost try to implement a new scheduler when the Linux community is already fighting over two of them, written by people who are being paid for it? Better to explain what they think should be done and let the other guys think about that first. This is called an open discussion, which is good for open source (and other things, such as the advancement of science) Besides, the message was not directed at Linux, but at OS scheduling theorists and practitioners in general.
4: Read and understand the bloody article!
Linux user since early January 1992.
He's not talking about binding. Or at least not only. He's talking about the OS scheduling processes and the application (i.e. user space) scheduling the threads within them. Not a new idea either, but then again he has not said the idea was new, he has only said he would want people to use it.
Linux user since early January 1992.
When someone asks the kind of question that gets a response "do it yourself" they're probably making the following implications: The developers have nothing better to do, and are just code monkeys waiting for ideas; you know what the developers should be doing better than the developers; the developers owe you something because you're using their software; the developers care whether or not you use their software.
These implications are pretty offensive, like saying to a volunteer who's picking up trash "when are you gonna get around to cleaning near my place? why haven't you done my area yet?" "Do it yourself, asshole"
Part of having a successful product is listening to what people want and working to implement that. Depends how you define "successful". An evangelist might take successful to mean "used by everyone", a developer might take it to mean "it does what I need". I can see your point that you need to listen to what people want to build software that will be used by those people, but that doesn't imply developers are obliged to implement any idea anyone comes up with. Now maybe you think that the devs shouldn't care, that it should just be whatever it is and there shouldn't be any thought given to making it what people want, unless said person is willing to do that. Fair enough, that's a valid stance. However if you take that stance, then do go evangelising Linux as a replacement for Windows or an everyman's OS. First; developers != evangelists. Second; why are you suggesting that if you want to recommend a piece of software you have to be prepared to implement everyone's ideas for them? Is Microsoft also obliged to implement suggestions from the public? Either way is ok, there's nothing wrong with saying "We are all about DIY, if you aren't willing to do it, don't expect other people to), you just have to recognise that is a viewpoint inconsistent with "We believe this is something everyone could and should use." It's inconsistent only if you have to write code to use the software, which isn't the case.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
yeah, and 'cat' is easy to remember because everybody know that cats tend to show their content (aka vomit) often.
anyway, it is not windows 'dir' but dos 'dir' and there were no folders in dos, only directories.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
DaBears, starting with the original teddy, (Roosevelt), are as much a symbol of soul-sucking capitalism as DeBeers. The world should give all the teddys and diamonds to me, as a means of purifying itself.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
No, he's not. The fact that some of those you've met were good does not mean it does not imply 'highly paid fanboy'. Or maybe you were questioning the 'highly paid' part :).
For balance, the only Apple Evangelist I ever had experience with was a Quickdraw 3D Evangelist. He was a clueless idiot. I asked him how they addressed the performance issue caused by QD3D lighting only working with full RGB, whereas DirectX supported a ramp mode for significant performance increase. He didn't have a fecking clue what I was talking about. At the time, that was actually a pretty basic bit of knowledge about the software renderers. I mentally turned off when he replied to that question with "Let's take this offline" (we were in a meeting with him, me, and 2 other people from my company).
He could run the QD3D demos for us, though. He was really good at that. He also demonstrated the plug-in renderer architecture they had developed, which was by far the most interesting thing I saw that day (spent the day at Cupertino talking to Apple people). It allowed NPR and toon-shading stuff, long before it became mainstream. He even had a demo that showed a model being rendered in a 'cave painting' style. Depressingly, no-one at Apple (and especially not the Evangelist) seemed to realise how cool it was (except the people who wrote it, maybe).
Clearly this is proof of the dominance of Linux, and how Windows Vista is going to fail!
People read reddit for the stories.
People read slashdot for comments.
People read digg for amusing pictures and pop culture things.
Editors are people too.Unlike userdriven selection of stories,it depends on one man choosing whatever on his mind at the time.
>All I'm saying is if you want Linux to really be a Windows killer, if you want it in every home, then part of what you have to do is drop the DIY
>attitude.
Who are you talking to? What makes you think many people want linux to "be a Windows killer" or "want it in every home?"
Linux is, from start to finish, *all* about DIY, or rather, about putting the ability to DIY (in terms of putting the tools to DIY in the hands of anyone who wants them, and also in terms of being allowed to DIY without risking lawsuits.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.
If I had two wishes that I could wish for this holiday season, the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace.. and the second would be for $30 million a month to be given to me, tax-free in a Swiss bank account.
You know, if I had three wishes that I could make this holiday season, first, of course, would be for all the children to get together and sing . . . the second would be for the $30 million every month to me . . . and the third would be for all encompassing power over every living being thing in the entire universe.
And if I had four wishes that I could make this holiday season, first would be the crap about the kids . . . second would be for the $30 million . . . the third would be for all the power.. and the fourth would be to set aside one month each year for an extended 31-day orgasm, to be brought about slowly by Rosanna Arquette and that model Paulina somebody, I can't think of her name, of course my lovely wife could come, too. She's behind me 100% on this, I guarantee you.
Wait a minute, maybe that sex thing should be the first wish! So, if I made that the first wish, because, you know, it could all go boom tomorrow, and then what have you got? No, no . . . the kids singing would be great, that would be nice. No, no, who am I kidding! I mean, they're not gonna be able to get all those kids together! I mean, the logistics of the thing is impossible! It's more trouble than it's worth!
So, we reorganize: here we go. First, the sex - we go with that; second, the money. No! We go with the power second, then the money, and then the kids. Oh, wait, oh geez! I forgot about revenge against my enemies! Okay . . . revenge against all my enemies, they should die like pigs in Hell! That would be the fourth wish! And of course, my fifth wish would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of peace and harmony.
Thank you, everybody.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Bang.
I graduated university in 1984, and my employer immediately enrolled me in a Unix class. I was much impressed by the configurability of csh, and (having used Atari OS/A+ and IBM DOS during an internship with NASA), immediately set up a long list of aliases in my .cshrc. I mapped 'ls' to 'DIR', 'cp' to 'COPY', 'mv' to 'RENAME', etc.
I was almost thrown out of the class by the outraged instructor. :-)
Now, don't go letting a Linux guy show up your lack of Windows knowledge! ;-) Not only is the relatively crippled cmd.exe a full Windows XP dir-lovin' app according to Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/cmd.mspx?mfr=true, but the new and advanced Microsoft Windows PowerShell or MSH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell uses dir as well. (Dir is also aliased to ls, in a nod to popular *nix shells.)
MSH is optional for current XP and Vista products, but will be installed by default with Server 2008. So it's rather awkward to claim 'dir' is not a Windows command. ;-)
Solaris geek time. Processor sets are a bit brute force, unless you have a very specialised workload. Placing distinct application sets into distinct projects, and then allocating those projects cpu shares for the fair shares scheduler to work with is a more general solution. Sometimes you do it to lump aspects of the same workload together, so that two workloads can co-exist reasonably. Sometimes you do it to keep aspects of the same workload together, so that one part can't swamp another. We did some judicious tuning of an old E450 that provides Cyrus mail for ~600 people, and found that keeping imapd and lmtpd in distinct projects, with nscd and bind in a third, allowed load averages of 150+ (no typo) and 95% CPU utilisation to nonetheless deliver decent response.
Cat wil give you the contents of a file yes, but it's short for concatenate. Which is what it is acutally meant for: concatenating multiple files.
Exactly the point and apparently, according to the poster, the Microsoft drone kept pretending that :
Thus proving that market drones are hopeless.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not many, but in numa, there is benefit for allocations and execution occur on the same memory 'node'. Of course, the OS scheduler should know what to deal with this...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Whoosh.
New here?
Read my blog.
While I don't entirely disagree with you, if there's a feature that a proprietary, pay-for program has that I need that the open source, free equivalent doesn't have, then ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll be cheaper for me to just buy the proprietary version than to try to comission someone to write it for me.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
>Asking people to contribute things is good; using contributability (if that's a word) as an excuse to ignore valid criticism is bad.
You know what's worse?
Ungrateful fucks who cry because other people don't do things for them.
To me those are the most despicable people on the planet.
evil is as evil does
I realize you're joking, but it actually makes a lot of sense: ls lists files, and cat concatenates the files you give on the command line (or standard input) to standard output.
a Quickdraw 3D Evangelist. He was a clueless idiot.
That was before my time, but it doesn't surprise me. Apple had a lot of third-rate players before Steve Jobs returned and did a major housecleaning.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Where I typed "inter" please read "intra". Quite important difference. Stupid me...
Linux user since early January 1992.
Hey now, ungrateful users just annoying to listen to, but ultimately, they're entirely harmless. If the developers would just stand their ground and be firm, they'd be the only ones to suffer, and whining users would take their business elsewhere.
There's a reason why XFree86 is one of the most widely used X11 implementation today, and one of the most thriving examples of open-source development. Why? Developers have to be firm, ignore all this completely unnecessary criticism and be committed to their own goals, needs, schedule and development methodology.
Back in 2000:
"What it the compatibility of the new MacOSX with my Exchange server and infrastructure?"
Answer: Ask Microsoft. That's really what they said.
"Do you have complete documentation on error codes in MacOS 9 (or 10 for that matter)?"
Answer: No! And fuck you for paying for developer support!
or more recently:
"Can the Xserve handle a LAMP stack?"
Answer: What's LAMP?
My experiences with developer and customer support from Apple have been consistently terrible. YMMV.