A current owner, not dismayed
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm currently on my third Saab. A couple decades ago, I scattered my old Chevy Citation along a guardrail during a snowstorm (one of the few guardrails in these Colorado mountains). I decided to get a safe winter vehicle, and found a used '83 Saab. Quirky, yes; cold, yes; but great control with a crash-cage disguised as a passenger compartment. Turbo is great for getting around trucks in the mountains.
My current Saab 93 is much more comfortable to drive, though their great handling means feeling every bump in the road.
The most recent models (I've driven them as loaners when mine is in for service) have moved the dashboard away from the driver by a few centimeters; enough to make reaching many controls annoying to me. I already knew my next car would not be a Saab. Since I haven't driven anything other than Saabs (and my father's Subaru Forester) for all these years, I don't know what I'll get. Hopefully by the time this one costs too much to maintain, nothing current will be sold anymore.
Just don't visit my house; I'm 80 meters off a US highway. Neither Verizon's nor AT&T's 3G hit here, even with an antenna. EDGE isn't enough for some things. Go 1/2 kilometer in any direction (okay, not down) and you're in heaven (relatively).
Here, our performance is measure with this hierarchy:
First, if the number of calls exceeds total man-service hours times 10, call the situation "swamped" and ignore the rest. I.e. average call is expected to take 5 minutes with a little time for overhead.
Second is percentage of calls that are answered live (i.e. the users didn't have to leave a message and we had to get back to them) followed by the percentages of calls that are returned within: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and took longer than 4 hours.
Third is number of tickets still open at the end of the day.
On our farm, we used to run a little still-like contraption that captured methane from manure that we used to run a water pump. My brother and I took that pump and made a go-cart with it (for a few days until my grandfather found out). Is the news here that a company has done this instead of a farm boy?
Not quite the same environmental conditions, for me it was working under a boss who is not responsible for the final product and gets bonuses for cutting costs.
I think lost is what is spent to restore a working music player, or, if not restored, the functionality of the Zune.
The concept that he is out $50 is a direct, easy, way to think about it: spent $50, now useless, out $50. Digging deeper to discern true cost only adds to the time cost. It just isn't worth the effort to account for everything involved with a broken machine -- unless you are somehow rewarded to figure out a "true cost."
There are many factors to include in such an accounting: the music gotten out of the Zune before it froze, the time to find a replacement and restore files to the new player, the $ spent on a new player, new features in a replacement, $ spent on transportation to/from store or shipping, the bad air breathed due to the manufacture and delivery of a replacement,...
My reward is merely in taking part in this conversation.
A few notes from our experiences starting about 15 years ago:
We were replacing three in-house computers and thought donating the old ones (once thoroughly cleaned) would be a nice thing to do. We found a local school remedial program that was still using some 1970's math cards and approached the teacher with our equipment.
The teacher was thrilled, and we (myself and our new-system-production guy) loaded a few free math and typing training programs, set them up one afternoon and watched as the six kids enjoyed them.
A week later, we got a letter from the school saying they do not accept unauthorized equipment and the offending computers had to be removed immediately. Our president was furious! He called the school, vented, and eventually arranged a face-to-face meeting.
Over the next two months, we had meetings with the school administration, we visited a meeting of the school board, attended a PTA gathering, and was even contacted by our supportive state representative (I don't really know what became of that). After much wrangling, arm twisting, and demoing of what we offered, we had three agreements in place to allow the kids to use the computers. I figured we (myself, production guy, and president) spend nearly 60 hours to donate our computers. 20 hours per computer.
Next year, we cycled through four more computers, and took them with our experience to the other side of town. First, our president call the school superintendent to arrange a meeting with the administration and school board to pitch our offer. There, we spent 10 minutes on a demo and nearly an hour answering questions. Next was to show our computers at a PTA meeting. That took another two hours. Finally, we spent an evening cleaning out an unused room, setting up our computers, and training two teachers how they worked. Total time was about 10 hours, or 2 1/2 hours per computer.
Today we have a program in place where our customers can return their old systems for a discount on a new one. This plus our own turn over nets us ten to twelve complete systems per year. (Much of what we get back is just too old or lacking a monitor to be worthy.)
We no longer have to train teachers on computers, but we do often have to get buy in from administrator types who hate any one else being all goody-goody. Common objections now are viruses and malware, access to pr0n, and what-happens-when-it-breaks. For the first two, we explain the built-in virus protection and firewall. (If they think pr0n is a solvable problem, they don't know that a firewall doesn't protect against it.)
We have teamed up with a computer store that does repairs and together we manage about 35 computers for three school labs. We are now taking more like five or six hours per computer, but we are more spread out. As we have the president's blessing, we can find a few hours each month to clean/prepare a system. We have a couple shelves in our production area where we store and work on the donation equipment so that we can easily take spend just a few minutes at a time at it.
Er, long story short: talk to administrators first, have a supportive company president, and set aside some space so that your time is easy to spend on it.
(As far as the company president goes, he's more enthused than we employees are. We have recycling for almost everything -- paper, aluminum, plastic, and obviously our computers. He uses scraps of paper to run his life -- the back of a fax to us can last him an entire day as he whittles it down to two cm strips.)
I post anonymously because I'm an insensitive clod.
Actually, I tend to answer questions on forums with my real id, or with a login that easily leads back to me. But I submit complete code blocks under one of several fake ids, and from my home system. Though I doubt I'd get fired for any of the code I've shared, we don't have any explicit policy at my job, and I don't want to test my boss's understanding of "trade secrets."
In a sufficiently large city, can you tell the difference anymore?
Being a largely word-at-my-pace programmer, I've always followed the sun (or lack thereof). The only reason to set my clock is because I meet with others and want to know when rush hour traffic would affect me. Since my primary clock is my cell phone, which adjusts automatically, I only have to worry about the clock above my bed and the one on the microwave -- the former I could solve with a clock that sets itself, and the latter I pretty much only use as a reference as I walk out the door. Friends have gotten used to my occasionally showing up exactly 1 hour late or early.
The definition of species from your primary or secondary education about critters that can breed is a gross simplification. (I pity if you heard it in college also.) That is one basis for determining a species. Others are:
Location, meaning these individuals could procreate with those, but they never travel far enough to do so (like across an ocean). Sometimes called "populations."
Morphology, i.e. color, patterns, size.
Habits, i.e. where they rest or what they eat.
Mating preferences can be based on all of the above. An example: finches that rest in trees and eat small seeds from succulent bushes tend to prefer the same, even though they can mate with finches that rest in rocks and eat larger seeds from weeds. These groups may live intermingled, they just don't choose mates that way. New chicks learn patterns from their parents, act that way as they age, and hang out with (mate) those who are similar. This is akin to humans marrying only folks of the same social class. Studies on the finches in the Galapagos show that nearly any "species" CAN mate with the others, they just don't.
The other large reason to define species is funding. More folks will donate to help the "Floreana tortoise" if it is called its own species, even though it is identical to the "Isabela tortoise" except for 1) the island they were/are on, and 2) a few genes. The rallying cry, "Restore the Floreana tortoise" is catchier than, "Move some tortoises and manage their breeding based on DNA."
The article mentions how tortoises may have been moved from Floreana to Isabela, but they don't mention the real causes of the extinction in the first place. The same whaling ships left goats on the islands to breed and create a population they can harvest meat from next time they visit. The goat population exploded. These goats eat the same bushes the tortoises eat, depriving them of food. The ships also left rats which ate their eggs. Over the past 10 years, eradication campaigns have wiped out the goats from almost all of the islands, and have eliminated rats from some of them. Now that the main causes of the extinctions have been (are are being) removed, efforts to reclaim the populations are starting. This is just one.
Maybe is isn't so worried about the cash he gave away, but the insane amount of debt he loaded up on credit cards thinking he wouldn't have to pay them off. Now some debt collector is threatening to do to him what the cancer would have. And, in a small fit of irony, he's scared for his life.
In my experience, the support works both ways. What I want, and enjoy, is the community of development.
When I need help with a particular project, say printing barcodes, the OSS community allows me to incorporate features into my code that I'd otherwise have to spend a lot of $ to get. The ability to extract source code to streamline the process for my users makes for an easier to use system.
Any code changes that I make that improve functionality or fixes bugs, I return to the project. (I guess that 2/3 of my changes are actually stripping out unneeded parts instead of putting in stuff.) I don't care that my About screen has pages of source listings. I think only one person has ever even looked at my licensing text. Only two people have ever talked to me about it, and one was my boss at work.
I benefit from the line of developers before me, and I support the developers who come after me.
If I stuck my head in a proprietary system, and only coded to add-ons I paid for, then I'm limited to what someone else decides to market. Since I support only a few users of any given program, I can't offer much $, so any company that wants to sell software won't listen to me, even if I find a reproducible bug in their applet.
"... I asked my dads lawyer..." I didn't know Bush wrote you email. Though, I understand his sentiment: he doesn't want his comments here altering anyone's view of his legacy.
Another situation that was used to look at air quality, though not many tried to tie it to climate change immediately: the widespread power outage in the US & Canada a few years ago: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8225/8225blackout.html (Chemical and Engineering News) Note: I can't find the article in Science about this... maybe someone else can.
The short: the air cleared very quickly of many pollutants, allowing scientists to refine their models on both time and distance these are in the air.
Sorry, I initially read this as a patch to "Step in the Right Direction" by the "Pirates of the Burning Sea." As in, Pirates changed the Right Direction.
Then I realized I was wrong and read further to see what it was all about.
Then I read some comments and decided I was closer the first time.
Long story short: we gave them access and they decided they didn't really want it.
We had a very similar experience two years ago. We track store information for franchises. One client politely asked to see the raw data for our reports and let them manage their own queries. Note: we have a similar policy of providing answers to one-off questions -- after all, it is their data.
I explained some of the trouble, but figured out how to protect the data from the most common stupid things.
Said company came back to us a week later asking us to write a couple new reports for them as they could not even begin to understand the data. Also, their keeping a DBA (or similarly knowledgeable person) on staff was far more expensive than the $100 we charged for a new report.
Since then, we've given other folks a peek at their data and explain to them that it is our job to make sense of it. And we have lots of custom reports, and we now charge $1 per year per report per store to maintain them. (Ex. a franchise with 500 stores and 6 custom reports pays us $3,000 extra beyond normal service prices.) My boss said we broke even on these requests last year, meaning we'll make a profit on them this year. So my boss is pleased, I'm content, and our customers have what they want.
Our data is well normalized, so only one capable of keeping multiple tables in their head could get any information beyond simple lists, for example "all stores." Otherwise, one quickly finds views of millions of records, or records with no valuable data.
Re:Thy Slashdot Dungeonman
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 1
The SCROLLBAR appears inactive. Possible reasons for this are: your screen resolution is too high, your browser window is too big, the programmer forgot to change the enabled status of the SCROLLBAR to True, you have not performed enough maneuvers to activate the SCROLLBAR. The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR
You have not provided an adjustment to the SCROLLBAR. The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1
Maybe you forgot something such as a reason for your mod. The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Troll
Missing ';'
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Troll;
The SCROLLBAR status is: 0 Troll.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Offtopic;
The SCROLLBAR status is: -1 Offtopic. The SCROLLBAR is now active. The FLASK slips down the active SCROLLBAR revealing a tiny hole. You are eaten by a grue.
In my development, not having an option governing this behavior is ridiculous after more than one person requests it operate differently.
Similarly ridiculous (to me) is the Professor's ad hominem rant.
Based on what little I can actually read at this time, forking seems reasonable -- experience tells me it won't be reasonable a few months or releases from now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm currently on my third Saab. A couple decades ago, I scattered my old Chevy Citation along a guardrail during a snowstorm (one of the few guardrails in these Colorado mountains). I decided to get a safe winter vehicle, and found a used '83 Saab. Quirky, yes; cold, yes; but great control with a crash-cage disguised as a passenger compartment. Turbo is great for getting around trucks in the mountains.
My current Saab 93 is much more comfortable to drive, though their great handling means feeling every bump in the road.
The most recent models (I've driven them as loaners when mine is in for service) have moved the dashboard away from the driver by a few centimeters; enough to make reaching many controls annoying to me. I already knew my next car would not be a Saab. Since I haven't driven anything other than Saabs (and my father's Subaru Forester) for all these years, I don't know what I'll get. Hopefully by the time this one costs too much to maintain, nothing current will be sold anymore.
Just don't visit my house; I'm 80 meters off a US highway. Neither Verizon's nor AT&T's 3G hit here, even with an antenna. EDGE isn't enough for some things. Go 1/2 kilometer in any direction (okay, not down) and you're in heaven (relatively).
April 1 at the end of August? Misuse a word and call it newsworthy?
Here, our performance is measure with this hierarchy:
First, if the number of calls exceeds total man-service hours times 10, call the situation "swamped" and ignore the rest. I.e. average call is expected to take 5 minutes with a little time for overhead.
Second is percentage of calls that are answered live (i.e. the users didn't have to leave a message and we had to get back to them) followed by the percentages of calls that are returned within: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and took longer than 4 hours.
Third is number of tickets still open at the end of the day.
On our farm, we used to run a little still-like contraption that captured methane from manure that we used to run a water pump. My brother and I took that pump and made a go-cart with it (for a few days until my grandfather found out). Is the news here that a company has done this instead of a farm boy?
Not quite the same environmental conditions, for me it was working under a boss who is not responsible for the final product and gets bonuses for cutting costs.
Sorry, that sounds like Best to me.
I think lost is what is spent to restore a working music player, or, if not restored, the functionality of the Zune.
The concept that he is out $50 is a direct, easy, way to think about it: spent $50, now useless, out $50. Digging deeper to discern true cost only adds to the time cost. It just isn't worth the effort to account for everything involved with a broken machine -- unless you are somehow rewarded to figure out a "true cost."
There are many factors to include in such an accounting: the music gotten out of the Zune before it froze, the time to find a replacement and restore files to the new player, the $ spent on a new player, new features in a replacement, $ spent on transportation to/from store or shipping, the bad air breathed due to the manufacture and delivery of a replacement, ...
My reward is merely in taking part in this conversation.
Q. Explain The Ramanujan conjecture.
A. I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
* This question brought to you by the Foundation for Corporate Speech Rights *
PS, I don't.
I had to laugh; among my friends we use these terms to describe the three branches of our government:
sedentary
metaphoric
ignatius
A few notes from our experiences starting about 15 years ago:
We were replacing three in-house computers and thought donating the old ones (once thoroughly cleaned) would be a nice thing to do. We found a local school remedial program that was still using some 1970's math cards and approached the teacher with our equipment.
The teacher was thrilled, and we (myself and our new-system-production guy) loaded a few free math and typing training programs, set them up one afternoon and watched as the six kids enjoyed them.
A week later, we got a letter from the school saying they do not accept unauthorized equipment and the offending computers had to be removed immediately. Our president was furious! He called the school, vented, and eventually arranged a face-to-face meeting.
Over the next two months, we had meetings with the school administration, we visited a meeting of the school board, attended a PTA gathering, and was even contacted by our supportive state representative (I don't really know what became of that). After much wrangling, arm twisting, and demoing of what we offered, we had three agreements in place to allow the kids to use the computers. I figured we (myself, production guy, and president) spend nearly 60 hours to donate our computers. 20 hours per computer.
Next year, we cycled through four more computers, and took them with our experience to the other side of town. First, our president call the school superintendent to arrange a meeting with the administration and school board to pitch our offer. There, we spent 10 minutes on a demo and nearly an hour answering questions. Next was to show our computers at a PTA meeting. That took another two hours. Finally, we spent an evening cleaning out an unused room, setting up our computers, and training two teachers how they worked. Total time was about 10 hours, or 2 1/2 hours per computer.
Today we have a program in place where our customers can return their old systems for a discount on a new one. This plus our own turn over nets us ten to twelve complete systems per year. (Much of what we get back is just too old or lacking a monitor to be worthy.)
We no longer have to train teachers on computers, but we do often have to get buy in from administrator types who hate any one else being all goody-goody. Common objections now are viruses and malware, access to pr0n, and what-happens-when-it-breaks. For the first two, we explain the built-in virus protection and firewall. (If they think pr0n is a solvable problem, they don't know that a firewall doesn't protect against it.)
We have teamed up with a computer store that does repairs and together we manage about 35 computers for three school labs. We are now taking more like five or six hours per computer, but we are more spread out. As we have the president's blessing, we can find a few hours each month to clean/prepare a system. We have a couple shelves in our production area where we store and work on the donation equipment so that we can easily take spend just a few minutes at a time at it.
Er, long story short: talk to administrators first, have a supportive company president, and set aside some space so that your time is easy to spend on it.
(As far as the company president goes, he's more enthused than we employees are. We have recycling for almost everything -- paper, aluminum, plastic, and obviously our computers. He uses scraps of paper to run his life -- the back of a fax to us can last him an entire day as he whittles it down to two cm strips.)
Next: the RIAA suing me for a song that was downloaded by my neighbor on a channel that just happened to be next to the one my TV was tuned to.
I post anonymously because I'm an insensitive clod.
Actually, I tend to answer questions on forums with my real id, or with a login that easily leads back to me. But I submit complete code blocks under one of several fake ids, and from my home system. Though I doubt I'd get fired for any of the code I've shared, we don't have any explicit policy at my job, and I don't want to test my boss's understanding of "trade secrets."
In a sufficiently large city, can you tell the difference anymore?
Being a largely word-at-my-pace programmer, I've always followed the sun (or lack thereof). The only reason to set my clock is because I meet with others and want to know when rush hour traffic would affect me. Since my primary clock is my cell phone, which adjusts automatically, I only have to worry about the clock above my bed and the one on the microwave -- the former I could solve with a clock that sets itself, and the latter I pretty much only use as a reference as I walk out the door. Friends have gotten used to my occasionally showing up exactly 1 hour late or early.
The definition of species from your primary or secondary education about critters that can breed is a gross simplification. (I pity if you heard it in college also.) That is one basis for determining a species. Others are:
Location, meaning these individuals could procreate with those, but they never travel far enough to do so (like across an ocean). Sometimes called "populations."
Morphology, i.e. color, patterns, size.
Habits, i.e. where they rest or what they eat.
Mating preferences can be based on all of the above. An example: finches that rest in trees and eat small seeds from succulent bushes tend to prefer the same, even though they can mate with finches that rest in rocks and eat larger seeds from weeds. These groups may live intermingled, they just don't choose mates that way. New chicks learn patterns from their parents, act that way as they age, and hang out with (mate) those who are similar. This is akin to humans marrying only folks of the same social class. Studies on the finches in the Galapagos show that nearly any "species" CAN mate with the others, they just don't.
The other large reason to define species is funding. More folks will donate to help the "Floreana tortoise" if it is called its own species, even though it is identical to the "Isabela tortoise" except for 1) the island they were/are on, and 2) a few genes. The rallying cry, "Restore the Floreana tortoise" is catchier than, "Move some tortoises and manage their breeding based on DNA."
The article mentions how tortoises may have been moved from Floreana to Isabela, but they don't mention the real causes of the extinction in the first place. The same whaling ships left goats on the islands to breed and create a population they can harvest meat from next time they visit. The goat population exploded. These goats eat the same bushes the tortoises eat, depriving them of food. The ships also left rats which ate their eggs. Over the past 10 years, eradication campaigns have wiped out the goats from almost all of the islands, and have eliminated rats from some of them. Now that the main causes of the extinctions have been (are are being) removed, efforts to reclaim the populations are starting. This is just one.
For more information, see http://www.galapagos.org/2008/ or look up "Lonesome George."
Maybe is isn't so worried about the cash he gave away, but the insane amount of debt he loaded up on credit cards thinking he wouldn't have to pay them off. Now some debt collector is threatening to do to him what the cancer would have. And, in a small fit of irony, he's scared for his life.
In my experience, the support works both ways. What I want, and enjoy, is the community of development.
When I need help with a particular project, say printing barcodes, the OSS community allows me to incorporate features into my code that I'd otherwise have to spend a lot of $ to get. The ability to extract source code to streamline the process for my users makes for an easier to use system.
Any code changes that I make that improve functionality or fixes bugs, I return to the project. (I guess that 2/3 of my changes are actually stripping out unneeded parts instead of putting in stuff.) I don't care that my About screen has pages of source listings. I think only one person has ever even looked at my licensing text. Only two people have ever talked to me about it, and one was my boss at work.
I benefit from the line of developers before me, and I support the developers who come after me.
If I stuck my head in a proprietary system, and only coded to add-ons I paid for, then I'm limited to what someone else decides to market. Since I support only a few users of any given program, I can't offer much $, so any company that wants to sell software won't listen to me, even if I find a reproducible bug in their applet.
"... I asked my dads lawyer ..." I didn't know Bush wrote you email. Though, I understand his sentiment: he doesn't want his comments here altering anyone's view of his legacy.
Then, explain now, who wrote the code for Windows Vista?
The meek inherit the Earth; maybe Homo Sapiens inherited it from the Neanderthals. (Rest in Peace.) Was there an inheritance tax at the time?
Some of us still think digital watches are pretty neat.
Another situation that was used to look at air quality, though not many tried to tie it to climate change immediately: the widespread power outage in the US & Canada a few years ago: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8225/8225blackout.html (Chemical and Engineering News) Note: I can't find the article in Science about this ... maybe someone else can.
The short: the air cleared very quickly of many pollutants, allowing scientists to refine their models on both time and distance these are in the air.
Using Beijing as another example will help these kinds of models, but reporting on "results" now looks more like an article in the Onion http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks than a real story.
Next they'll want to pass a constitutional amendment saying that 50% of spouses be female.
Congress should lead by example (since they're paid from taxes) and regulate that ~50% of all legislators be female.
Followed soon by presidents, Supreme Court Justices, diplomats, inmates, and folks on welfare.
Then, maybe we can get special legislation forcing gender and racial quotas for friends on Facebook.
Sorry, I initially read this as a patch to "Step in the Right Direction" by the "Pirates of the Burning Sea." As in, Pirates changed the Right Direction.
Then I realized I was wrong and read further to see what it was all about.
Then I read some comments and decided I was closer the first time.
Long story short: we gave them access and they decided they didn't really want it.
We had a very similar experience two years ago. We track store information for franchises. One client politely asked to see the raw data for our reports and let them manage their own queries. Note: we have a similar policy of providing answers to one-off questions -- after all, it is their data.
I explained some of the trouble, but figured out how to protect the data from the most common stupid things.
Said company came back to us a week later asking us to write a couple new reports for them as they could not even begin to understand the data. Also, their keeping a DBA (or similarly knowledgeable person) on staff was far more expensive than the $100 we charged for a new report.
Since then, we've given other folks a peek at their data and explain to them that it is our job to make sense of it. And we have lots of custom reports, and we now charge $1 per year per report per store to maintain them. (Ex. a franchise with 500 stores and 6 custom reports pays us $3,000 extra beyond normal service prices.) My boss said we broke even on these requests last year, meaning we'll make a profit on them this year. So my boss is pleased, I'm content, and our customers have what they want.
Our data is well normalized, so only one capable of keeping multiple tables in their head could get any information beyond simple lists, for example "all stores." Otherwise, one quickly finds views of millions of records, or records with no valuable data.
The SCROLLBAR appears inactive. Possible reasons for this are: your screen resolution is too high, your browser window is too big, the programmer forgot to change the enabled status of the SCROLLBAR to True, you have not performed enough maneuvers to activate the SCROLLBAR.
The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR
You have not provided an adjustment to the SCROLLBAR.
The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1
Maybe you forgot something such as a reason for your mod.
The SCROLLBAR status is: 1 Offtopic.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Troll
Missing ';'
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Troll;
The SCROLLBAR status is: 0 Troll.
>mod SCROLLBAR -1 Offtopic;
The SCROLLBAR status is: -1 Offtopic.
The SCROLLBAR is now active.
The FLASK slips down the active SCROLLBAR revealing a tiny hole.
You are eaten by a grue.
In my development, not having an option governing this behavior is ridiculous after more than one person requests it operate differently.
Similarly ridiculous (to me) is the Professor's ad hominem rant.
Based on what little I can actually read at this time, forking seems reasonable -- experience tells me it won't be reasonable a few months or releases from now.