Why do the Mozilla team have a love of using Xprint as their printing engine?
OK, in theory it's a nice idea but all the implementations I've come across are really dire.
The Xprt servers are generally single threaded with performance which sucks rocks through straws, they often crash and in the end produce output which is hardly readable.
Trying to use Xprt in a distributed, multi-user environment is, to put it mildly, challenging. Because of the single threaded nature of the X Consortium's implementation of the Xprt server it will only allow one client to connect and print at any one time, so whenever anyone prints they act as a denial of service attack for everyone else. Not only this, but even with the 3rd party package installed which makes the Solaris Xprt server actually work the output to printers is not exactly good, with letters running into each other and in random colours.
Why can't Mozilla use one of the other, well debugged and functional print engines rather than the half-hearted and poorly implemented Xprint which has never worked properly since it was first implemented in X11R6?
Sometimes it feels like the Mozilla developers are so focused on the idea that the only users of their product will be single-user, single desktop machines. Oh, yes, I forgot, that's what most of them are developing on.
The problems decribed here are endemic to the way what little money is available for British scientific research is distributed.
I work for the Earth Sciences department at Oxford University, one of the very best funded Universities in the UK, yet much of the time which should be spent on research by lecturers and postdoctural research staff is tied up with the beaurocracy of funding. Not only this but the funds available to keep the departments running, ie. the infrastructural costs, are going down year on year.
I feel for Professor Pillinger. He did the best job of getting funding he could. It's highly unlikely that he would have be able to get more managerial help from anyone in the current circumstances and the only person who could have publicised the whole thing was himself.
If the research council and funding bodies are anything like NERC, they only want research which already knows the results (ie. pointless) and is preferably one of the fashionable subjects (currently climate change and the environment).
Please note that I am speaking on behalf of myself and not in any way on behalf of the University of Oxford or the Department of Earth Sciences. All of the opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any group within the University of any policy thereof.
OK, so does this mean that we're getting a Marvin of small statue and squeaky voice? I do hope not. In the pevious discussion I made some snide remarks about the studios changing Marvin into a C3-PO like character. Maybe I didn't go far enough with my cynicisum, they maybe making him into a cross between R2-D2 and an Ewok. (eek!:-))
I can see that the producers might be one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes. (After the board of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, of course.)
Re:KDE + Non-GCC compiler == No-go.
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 1
I constantly give debugging feedback back to the KDE developers. Myself and a colleague managed to get kppp to work on Solaris in 2.x. However, I haven't got the knowledge of C++ to help out a great deal.
As for the compiler problems, again it needs an in-depth knowledge of C++, the code itself and the tricks being used with the linker before these can be addressed and I don't really have any of these. C++ is a language I've just not got around to learning as I'm generally still a traditional C programmer. (I grew up with Sinclair SuperBASIC, 68008/68000 assembler on the QL and Atari ST and following that C.)
KDE + Non-GCC compiler == No-go.
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Specifically, having tried many times to use Sun's (vastly faster then GCC) compilers to compile KDE and found that it's impossible due to a combination of GCC specific extensions or at least syntactic laxity and other GNUish bias I've had to give up.
I'm forced to compile the whole thing with the highly sub-optimal (for SPARC) gcc/g++.
I wish that programmers wouldn't depend upon the lax syntax of the world's favourite compiler and optimise their code specifically for systems which are already fast enough not to make much difference when it degrades performance on those which absolutely need the greatest acceleration to make them usable.
Sorry for the rant.:-)
My compile of KDE 3.2.0 at work on the Sun Ultra 10 has been going for a day already and I've just got QT, arts and kdelibs compiled. I should have a working system by the middle of next week, assuming I don't find any show stopping Linuxisms (which I usually do during KDE builds).
Please consider that this same reporter, Stephen Evan, sided with Disney etc. in a story stating that allowing copyright to lapse and the properties go into the public domain was not only wrong but tantamount to theft.
Unfortunately, I can't find the article when I search the BBC News web site. I know it was from the middle of last year and was noted on/. The only documentation for which I can find here.
It seems that this reporter's particular view of IP which puts it in the same class as a chair or a pot of gold. He also seems to go with whatever big business says rather than the opinions of others.
Of course, the Pan_Galactic Gargle Blaster will be an incipid alco-pop with a an alcohol content of about 0.1% proof.
Drinking it will be like having your skull bashed in with a slice of lemon, without the large gold brick. ie. messy and totally pointless with no effect whatsoever.
Well, by-passes are out.. the American 13-18 male demographic don't know what they are.
You can't have drinking to excess (even if it is with peanuts to help offset matter transfer and hyperspace) in a teenager film, so that's out.. It'll have to be Coca-Cola/Pepsi and Doritos instead.
The mid-western 13-18 male demographic wont understand probability, so the infinite improbability drive is out. It must be the particle of the month, just like Star Trek.
Satire isn't funny enough. Eddie the ship board computer will have to be smutty and/or throw custard pies. Marvin will be the cheery, slapstic C3PO look-alike.
I'll just go and drink a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (tm) (c)Zaphod Beeblebrox, (available at a seedy space ranger's bar near you) and drown my sorrows. (Oh, and that'll be canned as well!)
Make that hereditary heads of state being told by the politicians who they will bestoe an honour upon.
Since the restoration (where the British asked the king back 'cos even he was less tyranical than the parlimentarian revolutionaries) the monarch has had no real power to do anything much. In fact the monarch is forbidden to do anything remotely seen as overtly political.
Honour lists are made up by Whitehall functionaries (civil servants) and the political classes, most notably the ones in power at the time. The majority of knighthoods are given to civil servants so that they can be given a certain level of job where one of the unofficial prerequisits for the position is the title. This is especially true in the Ministry of Defence. As for the others they seem to be all purely political "thank-yous."
The best argument for the current status quo with respect to the British constitutional monarchy is that the head of state has no political power and hence no politician craves the position. Hence, we don't have a power hungry lieing sod in the position, merely a grandmother in a disfunctional family.
OK, now we can convert fossil fuels to hydrogen to power the vehicles.
Can anyone else see the logic flaw here?
Hydrogen fuel was being touted as a replacement fuel which would mean that not only did we not need to use up the fossil fuel reserve but also that the polutants produced would be just water vapour in stead of the longer lived greenhouse gases of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The idea being that you'd generate the hydrogen using some renewable energy resource, hence not merely moving the polution stage elsewhere.
So, now we have hydrogen powered vehicles being proposed which catalyse oil from the fossil fuel reserves, filter out the greenhouse gases and sulphurous polutants and vent them to the atmosphere, no doubt.
Re:I have some of these in my garage!
on
Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, the two types of Ultra 1 were:-
Ultra 1 - SBus graphics, le 10Mb/s ethernet and 8bit SCSI. (As the PROM didn't say UPA bus at POST I'm not even sure if it had the full memory switch architecture.)
Ultra 1e - UPA bus Creator graphics, HappyMeal 100Mb/s ethernet and wide SCSI. During POST this machine stated UPA bus.
The 1e was only available in 170MHz versions whereas the 1 was originally available as a 150MHz version and then later 170MHz.
Now, we've seen spammers use a copyrighted poem in their spam headers. I'd like to know how much they're worried about being taken to court about this. After all, they're not exactly on the right side of the law already...
(1) They subvert other people's computers to relay spam: illegal in most juristictions. (2) They send out viruses and worms to break into other people's computers: illegal in most juristictions.
So, if they're already doing two illegal things, why should they worry about a third?
Well, on the case of the patch problem. One of the Solaris strategy people was at a recent technology update day I attended. When I brought up the patch issue he sighed and agreed how terrible it was. He said things were going to improve but probably not to the degree he or I would like, mostly due to the big customers having the patchadd stuff entrenched. Hey-ho!
There IS a new patching tool available now from SunSolve but it's not exactly the bee's knees.
The last thing you want on a machine such as this is a reset button. You don't want the users treating as a PC and resetting it when they can't log in 'cos they've got caps lock on when trying to type their password.
Of course, if you really want to halt the machine in a panic there's always L1-A (oh, sorry, it's Stop-A now isn't it?).
I also found it a little amusing that he griped about the mouse being ball based.. Of course, Sun had been a ground breaking leader in ball-less optical mice way back in the 1980's but went back to ball based mice only about seven or eight years ago 'cos that's what the customers wanted.
The Blade 1500 is merely the replacement for the venerable old Ultra 10 which has been in production now for at least six years now.
Guess what that had.. Yes, a slowish IDE hard disk etc. etc. etc. and still outsold all the other workstation types 'cos it was relatively cheap (for a Sun) and hit the performance sweet spot, as in it wasn't totally crippled by the tiny cache in the Ultra 5 (and now Blade 100/150).
For general computing they're OK machines. They're nothing exciting but are rock solid in reliability terms.
I noticed in the article that the author quibbled at the reliability and suitability of items such as the power supply, hard disk and DVD drive. On the first count, SPARCs take a great deal less power than the current crop of x86 processors. Secondly, remember, Sun support these boxes for YEARS, and I mean many years. These machines sit plodding away running menial jobs and probably get replaced on a five to ten year cycle in some cases. All this time, Sun has to support the hardware. If, there was an inherent weekness in a component then Sun would generally avoid it for its own support cost reasons.
I work for a science department in a UK university and we have old Sun boxes still running which are coming up to their tenth birthday (actually, I've just retired our last SPARCstation 2!). No-one can say that these machines are fast, but they did their job well enough that they kept going. Speed isn't everything.
As for PCs, I think the oldest is something like Pentium 75MHz, we've just got rid of our last Apple Mac SE/30 too.;-)
He says that any work is a derived work if it uses an interface which the GPL program where the software needs an intimate knowledge of the GPL's program. In the case I put forward, the wrapper would need an intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel, hence would be a derived work of Linux. The wrapper would be implementing an interface which the device driver needs to know intimately and gets linked to it when it's loaded. Hence, it could be argued that the device driver is also a derived work of Linux if the first system the wrapper interface is implemented on is Linux even if the interface specification is OS neutral in itself. It would only not be a derived work if it's first implemented on another system, such as *BSD.
This is part of the grey area Linus talks about in his postings.
OK, from the article it seems that merely writing a device driver which uses the kernel module interface automatically makes the code a derived work. Also, building programs which include the kernel header files automatically makes those programs GPL.
Now, what if someone wrote another standard driver interface, separate from the kernel interface, wrote a device driver which implemented that and then wrote a GPL'd interface wrapper which translated the Linux module interface to that of the new standard?
Obviously, the wrapper interface code is now a derived work. However, does it also mean that because the new driver which uses a code interface which the GPL'd wrapper implements now is tainted by the GPL?
Also, does the driver become a derived work if the person who writes it initially does so to get some hardware working on his Linux box, rather than his other box which runs ObsureOS which also implements this standard device driver interface but the person hasn't installed the hardware on that machine yet?
Now, this comment is mildly off topic, but the article in question does show up a problem with the current structure of the Linux kernel, namely that drivers (including filesystem drivers) are closely intertwined with the workings of the kernel at a source level.
Currently, there is no way that you can have a totally stable kernel and yet have device drivers and filesystems develop independently. To do this, Linux would need at the very least a standardised device driver and filesystem API or better yet, a standardised ABI which doesn't change for the lifetime of a major revision.
All the major commercial UNIX's I know of have a standard ABI for their drivers, as do Windows. This is why you can still get hardware developers who maintain and release versions of device drivers for old releases of kernels for those operating systems for new hardware, because they can. I'd like to see someone try doing that for the current crop of Linux kernels.. oh yes, which version and sub-version from who's source tree was that for?
Not having a standard ABI for drivers helps cause a support hell, not only for end users, but as demonstrated here, the kernel maintainers as well.
The article's author lost all credibility for me when he discussed how he lost 2 weeks of important development code when the wrong *ROAMING PROFILE* was deleted and wasn't backed up.
This person was relying upon Windows' flaky desktop look and feel saving software to copy his project onto the server. If that's not stupidity, I'm not sure what is. Not only would it be a highly risky strategy but it would mean that everytime he logged out or logged in all that data would have to be copied to/from the server. What's wrong with holding all the data on a network disk?
I'm sorry, although some of the poor management practices and borderline admins have been highlighted in this article it also shows why the author shouldn't be the one slinging mud. He's as much to blame for the situation as those he is ranting about.
From the remarks at the beginning of the peice, it is obvious that this developer grew up hacking code on non-networked PC's fully under his control and he enjoyed its freedom. However, when you're using a complex, interdependent networked system, one rogue program can cause havoc, be it imported or internally generated. This is why there are restrictions (which can be made too restrictive by management).
The author also shows a certain disreguard for the problems of licensing hell in which we live today. Installing one extra copy of a program you happen to use in the lab and have the CD for can land your company in a major quagmire if an auditor finds it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do the Mozilla team have a love of using Xprint as their printing engine?
OK, in theory it's a nice idea but all the implementations I've come across are really dire.
The Xprt servers are generally single threaded with performance which sucks rocks through straws, they often crash and in the end produce output which is hardly readable.
Trying to use Xprt in a distributed, multi-user environment is, to put it mildly, challenging. Because of the single threaded nature of the X Consortium's implementation of the Xprt server it will only allow one client to connect and print at any one time, so whenever anyone prints they act as a denial of service attack for everyone else. Not only this, but even with the 3rd party package installed which makes the Solaris Xprt server actually work the output to printers is not exactly good, with letters running into each other and in random colours.
Why can't Mozilla use one of the other, well debugged and functional print engines rather than the half-hearted and poorly implemented Xprint which has never worked properly since it was first implemented in X11R6?
Sometimes it feels like the Mozilla developers are so focused on the idea that the only users of their product will be single-user, single desktop machines. Oh, yes, I forgot, that's what most of them are developing on.
Now, Mozilla merely suffered from "second system syndrome."
The problems decribed here are endemic to the way what little money is available for British scientific research is distributed.
I work for the Earth Sciences department at Oxford University, one of the very best funded Universities in the UK, yet much of the time which should be spent on research by lecturers and postdoctural research staff is tied up with the beaurocracy of funding. Not only this but the funds available to keep the departments running, ie. the infrastructural costs, are going down year on year.
I feel for Professor Pillinger. He did the best job of getting funding he could. It's highly unlikely that he would have be able to get more managerial help from anyone in the current circumstances and the only person who could have publicised the whole thing was himself.
If the research council and funding bodies are anything like NERC, they only want research which already knows the results (ie. pointless) and is preferably one of the fashionable subjects (currently climate change and the environment).
Please note that I am speaking on behalf of myself and not in any way on behalf of the University of Oxford or the Department of Earth Sciences. All of the opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any group within the University of any policy thereof.
OK, so does this mean that we're getting a Marvin of small statue and squeaky voice? I do hope not. In the pevious discussion I made some snide remarks about the studios changing Marvin into a C3-PO like character. Maybe I didn't go far enough with my cynicisum, they maybe making him into a cross between R2-D2 and an Ewok. (eek! :-))
I can see that the producers might be one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes. (After the board of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, of course.)
I constantly give debugging feedback back to the KDE developers. Myself and a colleague managed to get kppp to work on Solaris in 2.x. However, I haven't got the knowledge of C++ to help out a great deal.
As for the compiler problems, again it needs an in-depth knowledge of C++, the code itself and the tricks being used with the linker before these can be addressed and I don't really have any of these. C++ is a language I've just not got around to learning as I'm generally still a traditional C programmer. (I grew up with Sinclair SuperBASIC, 68008/68000 assembler on the QL and Atari ST and following that C.)
Specifically, having tried many times to use Sun's (vastly faster then GCC) compilers to compile KDE and found that it's impossible due to a combination of GCC specific extensions or at least syntactic laxity and other GNUish bias I've had to give up.
:-)
I'm forced to compile the whole thing with the highly sub-optimal (for SPARC) gcc/g++.
I wish that programmers wouldn't depend upon the lax syntax of the world's favourite compiler and optimise their code specifically for systems which are already fast enough not to make much difference when it degrades performance on those which absolutely need the greatest acceleration to make them usable.
Sorry for the rant.
My compile of KDE 3.2.0 at work on the Sun Ultra 10 has been going for a day already and I've just got QT, arts and kdelibs compiled. I should have a working system by the middle of next week, assuming I don't find any show stopping Linuxisms (which I usually do during KDE builds).
Please consider that this same reporter, Stephen Evan, sided with Disney etc. in a story stating that allowing copyright to lapse and the properties go into the public domain was not only wrong but tantamount to theft.
/. The only documentation for which I can find here.
Unfortunately, I can't find the article when I search the BBC News web site. I know it was from the middle of last year and was noted on
It seems that this reporter's particular view of IP which puts it in the same class as a chair or a pot of gold. He also seems to go with whatever big business says rather than the opinions of others.
Actually, more in keeping with the original, an over egotistical, over the top American radio DJ would fit the bill.
Of course, the Pan_Galactic Gargle Blaster will be an incipid alco-pop with a an alcohol content of about 0.1% proof.
Drinking it will be like having your skull bashed in with a slice of lemon, without the large gold brick. ie. messy and totally pointless with no effect whatsoever.
Surely it depends upon who buys the product placement rights?
"Ford Prefect" could become "Mercedes SLK" or "Jeep Grand Cheroke."
I blame it on someone working out what the question to the ultimate answer is...
Hmm.. this is a relatively recent abbreviation for the title. I've known it by the terms "HHGTTG" or just "The Guide" since the early 80's.
I think it was coined as a useful abbreviation purely for the web site Douglas Adams set up with the help of Aunty Beeb.
Well, by-passes are out.. the American 13-18 male demographic don't know what they are.
You can't have drinking to excess (even if it is with peanuts to help offset matter transfer and hyperspace) in a teenager film, so that's out.. It'll have to be Coca-Cola/Pepsi and Doritos instead.
The mid-western 13-18 male demographic wont understand probability, so the infinite improbability drive is out. It must be the particle of the month, just like Star Trek.
Satire isn't funny enough. Eddie the ship board computer will have to be smutty and/or throw custard pies. Marvin will be the cheery, slapstic C3PO look-alike.
I'll just go and drink a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (tm) (c)Zaphod Beeblebrox, (available at a seedy space ranger's bar near you) and drown my sorrows. (Oh, and that'll be canned as well!)
Make that hereditary heads of state being told by the politicians who they will bestoe an honour upon.
Since the restoration (where the British asked the king back 'cos even he was less tyranical than the parlimentarian revolutionaries) the monarch has had no real power to do anything much. In fact the monarch is forbidden to do anything remotely seen as overtly political.
Honour lists are made up by Whitehall functionaries (civil servants) and the political classes, most notably the ones in power at the time. The majority of knighthoods are given to civil servants so that they can be given a certain level of job where one of the unofficial prerequisits for the position is the title. This is especially true in the Ministry of Defence. As for the others they seem to be all purely political "thank-yous."
The best argument for the current status quo with respect to the British constitutional monarchy is that the head of state has no political power and hence no politician craves the position. Hence, we don't have a power hungry lieing sod in the position, merely a grandmother in a disfunctional family.
I wonder how long it will be until JPL start getting messages back from spirit saying:-
iNPut INpuT InPuT inPUt
Maybe number 5 is alive?!
(For those of you who don't get the reference, it's the film "Short Circuit")
OK, now we can convert fossil fuels to hydrogen to power the vehicles.
Can anyone else see the logic flaw here?
Hydrogen fuel was being touted as a replacement fuel which would mean that not only did we not need to use up the fossil fuel reserve but also that the polutants produced would be just water vapour in stead of the longer lived greenhouse gases of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The idea being that you'd generate the hydrogen using some renewable energy resource, hence not merely moving the polution stage elsewhere.
So, now we have hydrogen powered vehicles being proposed which catalyse oil from the fossil fuel reserves, filter out the greenhouse gases and sulphurous polutants and vent them to the atmosphere, no doubt.
Actually, the two types of Ultra 1 were:-
Ultra 1 - SBus graphics, le 10Mb/s ethernet and 8bit SCSI. (As the PROM didn't say UPA bus at POST I'm not even sure if it had the full memory switch architecture.)
Ultra 1e - UPA bus Creator graphics, HappyMeal 100Mb/s ethernet and wide SCSI. During POST this machine stated UPA bus.
The 1e was only available in 170MHz versions whereas the 1 was originally available as a 150MHz version and then later 170MHz.
Now, we've seen spammers use a copyrighted poem in their spam headers. I'd like to know how much they're worried about being taken to court about this. After all, they're not exactly on the right side of the law already...
(1) They subvert other people's computers to relay spam: illegal in most juristictions.
(2) They send out viruses and worms to break into other people's computers: illegal in most juristictions.
So, if they're already doing two illegal things, why should they worry about a third?
Here! Here!
Well, on the case of the patch problem. One of the Solaris strategy people was at a recent technology update day I attended. When I brought up the patch issue he sighed and agreed how terrible it was. He said things were going to improve but probably not to the degree he or I would like, mostly due to the big customers having the patchadd stuff entrenched. Hey-ho!
There IS a new patching tool available now from SunSolve but it's not exactly the bee's knees.
Yes, I laughed at the reset button jibe.
The last thing you want on a machine such as this is a reset button. You don't want the users treating as a PC and resetting it when they can't log in 'cos they've got caps lock on when trying to type their password.
Of course, if you really want to halt the machine in a panic there's always L1-A (oh, sorry, it's Stop-A now isn't it?).
I also found it a little amusing that he griped about the mouse being ball based.. Of course, Sun had been a ground breaking leader in ball-less optical mice way back in the 1980's but went back to ball based mice only about seven or eight years ago 'cos that's what the customers wanted.
The Blade 1500 is merely the replacement for the venerable old Ultra 10 which has been in production now for at least six years now.
;-)
Guess what that had.. Yes, a slowish IDE hard disk etc. etc. etc. and still outsold all the other workstation types 'cos it was relatively cheap (for a Sun) and hit the performance sweet spot, as in it wasn't totally crippled by the tiny cache in the Ultra 5 (and now Blade 100/150).
For general computing they're OK machines. They're nothing exciting but are rock solid in reliability terms.
I noticed in the article that the author quibbled at the reliability and suitability of items such as the power supply, hard disk and DVD drive. On the first count, SPARCs take a great deal less power than the current crop of x86 processors. Secondly, remember, Sun support these boxes for YEARS, and I mean many years. These machines sit plodding away running menial jobs and probably get replaced on a five to ten year cycle in some cases. All this time, Sun has to support the hardware. If, there was an inherent weekness in a component then Sun would generally avoid it for its own support cost reasons.
I work for a science department in a UK university and we have old Sun boxes still running which are coming up to their tenth birthday (actually, I've just retired our last SPARCstation 2!). No-one can say that these machines are fast, but they did their job well enough that they kept going. Speed isn't everything.
As for PCs, I think the oldest is something like Pentium 75MHz, we've just got rid of our last Apple Mac SE/30 too.
This isn't how Linus has interpreted the GPL.
He says that any work is a derived work if it uses an interface which the GPL program where the software needs an intimate knowledge of the GPL's program. In the case I put forward, the wrapper would need an intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel, hence would be a derived work of Linux. The wrapper would be implementing an interface which the device driver needs to know intimately and gets linked to it when it's loaded. Hence, it could be argued that the device driver is also a derived work of Linux if the first system the wrapper interface is implemented on is Linux even if the interface specification is OS neutral in itself. It would only not be a derived work if it's first implemented on another system, such as *BSD.
This is part of the grey area Linus talks about in his postings.
OK, from the article it seems that merely writing a device driver which uses the kernel module interface automatically makes the code a derived work. Also, building programs which include the kernel header files automatically makes those programs GPL.
Now, what if someone wrote another standard driver interface, separate from the kernel interface, wrote a device driver which implemented that and then wrote a GPL'd interface wrapper which translated the Linux module interface to that of the new standard?
Obviously, the wrapper interface code is now a derived work. However, does it also mean that because the new driver which uses a code interface which the GPL'd wrapper implements now is tainted by the GPL?
Also, does the driver become a derived work if the person who writes it initially does so to get some hardware working on his Linux box, rather than his other box which runs ObsureOS which also implements this standard device driver interface but the person hasn't installed the hardware on that machine yet?
Now, this comment is mildly off topic, but the article in question does show up a problem with the current structure of the Linux kernel, namely that drivers (including filesystem drivers) are closely intertwined with the workings of the kernel at a source level.
Currently, there is no way that you can have a totally stable kernel and yet have device drivers and filesystems develop independently. To do this, Linux would need at the very least a standardised device driver and filesystem API or better yet, a standardised ABI which doesn't change for the lifetime of a major revision.
All the major commercial UNIX's I know of have a standard ABI for their drivers, as do Windows. This is why you can still get hardware developers who maintain and release versions of device drivers for old releases of kernels for those operating systems for new hardware, because they can. I'd like to see someone try doing that for the current crop of Linux kernels.. oh yes, which version and sub-version from who's source tree was that for?
Not having a standard ABI for drivers helps cause a support hell, not only for end users, but as demonstrated here, the kernel maintainers as well.
The article's author lost all credibility for me when he discussed how he lost 2 weeks of important development code when the wrong *ROAMING PROFILE* was deleted and wasn't backed up.
This person was relying upon Windows' flaky desktop look and feel saving software to copy his project onto the server. If that's not stupidity, I'm not sure what is. Not only would it be a highly risky strategy but it would mean that everytime he logged out or logged in all that data would have to be copied to/from the server. What's wrong with holding all the data on a network disk?
I'm sorry, although some of the poor management practices and borderline admins have been highlighted in this article it also shows why the author shouldn't be the one slinging mud. He's as much to blame for the situation as those he is ranting about.
From the remarks at the beginning of the peice, it is obvious that this developer grew up hacking code on non-networked PC's fully under his control and he enjoyed its freedom. However, when you're using a complex, interdependent networked system, one rogue program can cause havoc, be it imported or internally generated. This is why there are restrictions (which can be made too restrictive by management).
The author also shows a certain disreguard for the problems of licensing hell in which we live today. Installing one extra copy of a program you happen to use in the lab and have the CD for can land your company in a major quagmire if an auditor finds it.