You need to explain to the population of Earth (or to the population of the USA) what exactly they will *personally* gain from all this. Considering that they will get nothing, I just don't see where the budget for this space opera would come from.
This society is not ready for operations in space and on other planets simply because there is no reason to do so, outside of a very far-fetched possibility of the global catastrophe. But even then who will be dying happily, knowing that there are a few Earthlings on the Moon?
That colony on the Moon will not be self-sustaining for a very long time. You could build a far better colony on the bottom of an ocean. If your robots can't operate in water and gather food that just swims by then those same robots probably can't operate 300 Mm away on the Moon, where the spare parts can't be delivered within a few hours.
The problem of purpose will be very severe on the Moon. You probably will have to stock the colony with astronomers, theoretical physicists, and other people who benefit from vacuum or do not care. Nor will they care for human interaction because there won't be much of that in a small group. If the colonists are only tasked with menial jobs of miners and drivers then very soon people will start asking themselves "Why I am here and what I am doing?"
The conditions on the Moon are so harsh that pretty much any malfunction of life support is fatal. But spacesuits and vehicles do not last forever, especially when the nearest spare is on another planet. Go out, tear the spacesuit and die. Go out, break the faceplate and die. Go out, have the battery short out, lose air and heat and die. Do not go out, have a crack in the wall, lose air and die. There are too many ways to die - the colony will be facing some serious attrition, unless they constrain themselves to the insides of a strong pressure vessel. That won't work because the colony has to use outside resources and materials to be partially self-supporting. It may quickly devolve into another reality show, with very real dead bodies. What is the purpose of all this?
Now they threaten any (developed) country that attempts to protect its workers in exactly the same manner, and we're supposed to just suck it up as we're reduced to poverty and the.1% go from controlling half the wealth in the country to controlling three quarters of it?
Corporations are not people. They are abstract, mathematical entities. Your complaint has as much weight as the one about water flowing downhill. Nobody is forced to form a corporation here, and nobody is forbidden from forming a corporation there. How do you fight that? If you make it economically inefficient to open a company in the USA... guess what, there won't be any new companies open in the USA. This already happened to the established businesses, and the businesses reacted predictably - they opened overseas branches and moved all the work there. Plenty of commercial buildings in the USA stand vacant, with not a worker in sight.
Or, to put it in other terms, how much beating do you need to do until the morale improves?
for a great many people, their jobs have been sent out of the country by the "job creators."
The job creators did not send your job abroad because they hate you. They did that because the foreign country offered them better terms. You lost on the global labor market.
You don't need advanced anything to install Linux. You only need to buy the compatible hardware - not the one that is locked down to become an entertainment console and a telescreen in one neat package.
What stops you from connecting a JTAG pod and reflashing the UEFI BIOS, replacing it with a copy of GRUB, for example? As long as the hardware is not crippled until some magic occurs between the CPU and the TPM, you should be able to run your code right from the reset vector.
But my comment was about suitability of a form factor to the lifestyle of the digital rebel. You carry a phone, but not a desktop. Even my parents rarely turn the desktop on after they got a new Nexus 7 tablet. They only need a browser, Skype and Foliant. Everything else is an unwanted complexity that is only likely to fail.
So which is it, can you make me a LGA1155 socket motherboard or can't you? Or did you mean "any CPU you want, as long as it's an ancient and outdated one with open specs"?
I can make any motherboard, with LGA1155 or any other socket - or with direct attachment of a CPU that is packaged as a BGA. Why not? It's not rocket science. The pin grid is 0.91 mm, which is pretty generous today. My last BGA design involved a part with a 0.5 mm pitch; that was expensive. You may want to have Intel's reference designs, but they are obtainable today, and I have some for Atom (because that's what I need.) The DDRx routing will have to be carefully done, but that's also not an impossible task. I built 20A, 0.9V polyphase power supplies before, for a PowerPC project. There is hardly anything else that is notable.
But super-fast and super-hot motherboards of this kind are not what the digital rebel needs, IMO. He needs a small, lightweight, portable system - a tablet would be ideal, especially if it accepts external attachments like the monitor and USB. In reality all modern tablets are already suitable for the task. Communication, not data crunching, is the primary use of computers today - and any low-power system can do it just as well as a hot desktop.
Another reason for a digital rebel to not depend on Intel is that Intel can be asked (or forced) to make sure that their CPUs don't even start until they authenticate with the BIOS. You can build such a system already. For example, the CPU will refuse to access most of its address space until it issues a challenge to the BIOS (or TPM) and receives a correct response. The pre-auth mode would be just good enough to boot up, but if you need to run an OS you need the CPU unlocked. The private key to the CPU is in the mask, and the chances of getting to it are nearly zero.
In this situation it is essential to have an entirely free CPU design that is not constrained by artificial barriers. There are already lots of good CPUs that are ready for an FPGA. If there is a need, a SoC can be synthesized from existing RTL components and then manufactured as an ASIC. If that is illegal, use FPGA and program your own bitstream. Either way, computers are here to stay, and the only way to restrict access to them is not technical but social (like public beheading of underground engineers.)
If there is a demand there will be the offer. I will personally make m/boards for you that run whatever CPU you want and use whatever booting technology you want. If you insist I can use an entirely FPGA-based design that is 100% F/OSS. It may not be as good as an Intel CPU, but it will work.
The only way to block this is to make it illegal. But I cannot imagine how you can make microcontrollers illegal today. Would I need a license to own a debugger or a soldering iron?
Don't enrage your boss, by making excuses, by essentially lying to his face and assuming he is stupid enough to believe your drivel.
In this case there was only one (1) email from Mauro to Rafael. Linus jumped into this thread all by himself. Mauro tried to defend his patch, and he was technically wrong because the patch had unwanted side effects. But you don't publicly call a person an idiot for a single technical error. If I were Mauro's manager, at very least I would have asked him, in private, "Why did you think this is a good patch? Did you have your reasons? Let's talk about them. Or maybe you were tired, or sick? Things happen, I know that. Let's discuss what went wrong."
I'll bet Linus was more pissed off at having his intelligence insulted with this lame excuse
It is both, actually. Linus's email attacks both the technical solution and the Mauro's reaction.
But if I were to start throwing chairs whenever my intelligence is insulted by something I read on the Internet, I'd run out of chairs pretty soon.
If he humbled himself to every fool, and every fool's excuses Linux code would be crap.
Does the phrase "speak softly and carry a big stick" ring any bell? Aside from the political connotations, it points out that your influence is not determined by how much red in the face you can become. Your influence is determined by how much power you wield. Linus has the power; he had no reason, or even right, to publicly scream profanities at a coder who had a single case of poor judgement. Nobody has a right to verbally assault another person; it's an abuse:
Verbal abuse is the use of words to cause harm to the person being spoken to. It is difficult to define and may take many forms. Similarly, the harm caused is often difficult to measure. The most commonly understood form is name-calling. Verbal abuse may consist of shouting, insulting, intimidating, threatening, shaming, demeaning, or derogatory language, among other forms of communication.
Perpetrators of verbal abuse often misuse their authority and prey on those in a subordinate position. Victims of verbal abuse are often told they are to blame for the abuser's behavior and reluctant to take action to end the abuse. Verbal abuse may lead to stress, depression, physical ailments, and other damage.
There are many good thoughts in what you have written. But you are asking:
So, some part of me wonders, is Linus getting angry because the current kernel architecture is hitting its design limits and he does not want to admit that?
I read the single email from Linus, and this email created an impression that Linus requires kernel maintainers to be flawless in all aspects. They must not make technical mistakes - and they must not make mistakes about handling those technical mistakes. Linus is angry about both these points.
As a manager, Linus is wrong here on both counts. People always make mistakes; they always were making them, and they always will. The manager should accept that, and manage those mistakes to minimize them. Why Mauro got defensive about his decision? Perhaps he was *afraid* of being shouted at by Linus? That is one side effect of the policy of management by throwing chairs - your subordinates begin hiding the problems. A smart manager would create an atmosphere where it is perfectly safe - and even encouraged - to share the current list of problems. This particular deal is not worth a single burned up nerve cell. OK, they had a bad patch and it broke an experimental kernel (which exists to test just for those situations.) They had a poorly coded testing tool. Those are technical issues, and they should be dealt with accordingly. If the maintainer is consistently delivering buggy patches then Linus may want to revoke his commit rights. If this was a single oversight, for whatever reason, it is sufficient that the guilty person accepts the responsibility. Throwing chairs is never a solution, it only shows your weakness to your subordinates (your anger is your weakness because it overrides your reasoning.) In the world of Bondian supervillains the deadliest one is always calm and quiet; and the one that blows up at every opportunity is most likely an idiot.
Lisias already mentioned Brazil, but their approach is not unique. If you scream at me and publicly call me an idiot, I do not even want to know why you did so and whether you had any good reason. The tone will dominate the emotions; a screaming man is likely an enemy to be fought. Few people can be emotionally ready for a fight and at the same time sufficiently cold-blooded to hear the message. Screaming at a subordinate is a direct threat of violence, and you can easily trace that down to the animal kingdom. I do not approve violence against my workers. If they are smart enough they will understand my message that is delivered in a calm voice. If they are not smart enough, they are at a wrong job.
And here is the management problem. Harsh tone distracts from the message. You may start with a true manufacturing issue, but pretty soon words will be said that shouldn't have been said; a minute later teeth start flying. Do you think if you and your worker maim each other you will be still on friendly terms, always ready to discuss a work process? I don't expect that to be the case; far more likely you both would have to watch your backs.
Many commenters (dbIII in particular) said that some groups of workers do not understand polite language and treat everything as optional until they are shouted at. I was working a few days at construction sites (as an artifact of higher education in the old USSR) but I haven't seen managers *shouting* at workers. As I said elsewhere, construction workers are not weaklings in -12.0 glasses, they can shout back and they can hit back - and on many sites workers are operating far apart, so whoever survives tells *his* story. Sure, managers were talking 100% profanity there, but that wasn't offensive, it was the normal way to communicate among that crowd, it was their standard vocabulary.
Perhaps, as dbIII mentions, there are still places and times when you, as a manager, have to scream and shout and throw chairs. I must say I never worked in such places. If my manager would ever dare to offend me, at best I would walk out of the place in the nearest ten seconds. For some reason that was never needed, and managers always found a way to communicate their state of mind without insulting employees.
It could be that my experience is uncommon in the industry. The industry is large - you have theoretical physicists on one end and you have coal miners on another. You have a mistake where a researcher puts a digit in a wrong place and skews the measurement by 0.05%, which requires a repeat measurement at expense of five minutes. You also have a mistake when the miner inserts the explosive charges incorrectly and is about to kill everyone around. Those are different cases, and different words may be suitable. I do not know how they work down there. But I am well acquainted with the environment of engineering labs and cubes, and we never shouted at each other. As matter of fact, such shouting would be a serious offense per company's HR rules. Hostile work atmosphere, that's how it is called. No manager would ever dare to go there. And they never had to. Engineers have affinity to logic, they can be easily explained what their options are. You only need to talk to them, in person. There is nothing in that talk that you need external witnesses for.
I've had subordinates where in response to a mistake, if my voice wasn't at least 3dB louder than normal with the word "fuck" liberally inserted into my speech, what I said wouldn't be taken seriously and the specific problem would continue.
I must confess that if I had to have such an employee he would be fired. I would never raise my voice or use the words that such a person could comprehend. That is in part because I am not able to be that intimidating, and in part because that would not be good for the rest of the team. Rephrasing a well known expression, "Never quarrel with an old boss - if he is not strong enough to fight you he will fire you."
I was able to get away with my limitations because I operate in a relatively polite world of engineering. I would never make it even to the lowliest rung of the management ladder in construction. But I will not scream at anyone.
You would have to research more than just reading Linus's email to learn that. If you are a programmer yourself this is what you would naturally do. If you are an HR person you just dump the resume - there are many more, and none of those applicants are screamed at by Linus! They must be real good then!:-)
Instead of screaming and cursing at him, or ordering that he be fired or otherwise punished, the pilot said something like, "I bet you're not going to do that again, are you? Now fix my goddamned plane."
This is the approach that I'm advocating here. Rage is usually pointless unless you are willing to beat the guy into a pulp. Screaming does not matter; actions do. Screaming only works when the physical violence is a real possibility. Today it is not. Unless you are him.
:-) It's not a secret. Just look three lines above this reply. There is a URL.
But note that D'Artagnan's behavior was above and beyond what any aristocrat of the time would do; it was laughably so - an overcompensation for the color of his horse, as I recall:-)
See, here's the thing I don't get. Why would you be deeply offended? They are just words. Change and get better. It's no big deal.
It is something that is very individual. D'Artagnan, on approach to Paris, was extremely sensitive to any imaginary offense. But a lowly peasant of the same era would be meek to the point of "Thank you, Sir - may I have another?" These differences exist today just as they existed hundreds of years ago. Almost all of them are cultural.
As far as I can tell, he's been going about his kernel programming business as normal since then
Good for him then. He made his decision. It concerns no one else.
You don't tell a welder that their weld is just not quite right and to please do it again if it's not too much trouble. You tell them it's fucked and to grind it out and do it again before everything falls down and kills someone.
I'm not sure how you manage your welders, but I would go about like this:
"Bill, this bead is too shallow. It won't bear the load. The bottom of the weld is cold, and there is no metal there. You will have to grind it out and redo. This weld will be inspected with X-ray to make sure you do it right this time. We will have to pay you overtime, by law, for this. But if you do it again there will be no overtime - you will get your final check instead. The reason is that if these welds fail someone will be killed. It is that important. Please do your best."
This explains the problem, explains what to do to correct, and also spells out the consequences for continued bad work. It ends with an encouragement; you never want to end the conversation with a threat. But the overall content of the message is exactly the same as yours, and the welder will not feel offended. He will feel ashamed of his poor work. It won't make him happy, but by the end of the day he will know that I was right - actually, as soon as he grinds his superficial bead away and exposes the unwelded groove.
And if in my opinion the guy is hopeless I will simply summon HR to have him dismissed right away. There is no need to offend him by telling him that he is an idiot. He may well be, but it's not in my interest to infuriate people. I simply don't have a use of him anymore. Nothing personal.
In that aspect, try to not enrage your welders when you chew them up at a height of 100 storeys. It's a long fall to the ground, and people do see red when they are angry.
Clearly that is what he wanted if Mauro didn't choose to change.
If the man cannot change (you establish that in private) you simply privately advise him to quit, unless he wants to be fired. This is how it usually works in the real world. Nobody needs conflicts. The last thing you want to do is to poison the future of the person - and this rant on LKML is serving exactly that function. Every employer will easily find out that Mauro is a worthless coder (even though he is not - you don't get to become a kernel maintainer if you don't know the difference between p, &p and *p.)
Also, I'm not sure I understand why you care about honor so much. Honor from who, exactly?
Many people join F/OSS and work with others because they want to do good things and they want to be appreciated for that. There are people who like to remain in shadows, like me, but the majority wants to be known and respected. They often get that.
And here comes the public annihilation of the person's contribution and the person's skills. Linus's response says "you are an idiot, an incompetent, and you are out of here." This destroys the motivation to ever join such a bloodthirsty and vengeful crowd. Mauro lost his standing among his peers - among LKML readers and other programmers. He lost respect among many, because Linus's word and God's word are about the same.
I don't know what he will do now. There are several possibilities, and we don't have to run ahead of the events. Besides, it's not my business to plan - or watch - his life anyway. But I personally would expect a person in this situation to step away from any F/OSS work because such a person would be deeply offended. Yes, he made a mistake. But the mistake in an -RC kernel is not worth of destroying a person this way. Joseph Stalin would do that, and now Linus, but every modern manager would simply privately talk to the guilty party and explain the rules of the game. People must be respected - even those who err. Linus demonstrated (again) a horrible lack of respect for his teammate. A person may be in a wrong position, but it is *your* fault as a manager that you promoted him that high (gave him commit rights.) Even if the person makes a mistake and proves that he reached his level of incompetence, you do not publicly scream at him - this is simply inhumane. As a manager, you have better tools at your disposal.
Linus doesn't want to ever see the guy again, unless he's willing to change.
Anyone not resigning his position after such humiliation is not deserving the position just because he would have no honor. People may quit even if such a talk is given in private. Mauro probably screwed up, as it seems; but you don't trample upon people who happened to be in a wrong job - you reassign them to a job that they are competent at. The worst of it, the whole rage is pointless - Mauro is out anyway; maybe he will quit RedHat as well. Is that what Linus wanted?
It would appear that a better solution is simply to write simpler tax laws that don't create the loopholes in the first place rather than to try to patch the loopholes with more convoluted tax law. But that is so very much unlikely to happen while Congress is immune to the insider trading and securities exchange laws.
The Congress has no part in this, unless it is ready to compete with Cayman Islands on 0% corporate tax. A corporation may be started in the USA as an accident of being the initial home country of its founders. However at any point that company can be sold for $1 to a Cayman Islands corporation, and the founders will be hired (for another $1 per head) to their original positions. On the other hand, their corporate credit cards will be unlimited, and the business will generously contribute to certain trust funds that the founders have no official control over - and as such are insulated from, tax-wise.
If the EU wants to play hard ball it should impose a levy on transactions with known tax havens
Just wait until the WTO hears about it.
The problem cannot be fixed until there are independent countries that have more favorable taxation. The modern economy is getting more and more data-oriented, which makes it possible to telecommute, "working" in any remote office on the planet. Will the tax man be breaking the doors down and checking what you are doing on your home computer? If not, your salary will be safely collecting offshore, available for a transfer (or a loan!) whenever you want. Already legal; there is no law against working for free. You will probably die from old age with a few million dollars of debt to your "creditor" overseas. Alternatively, you could be periodically receiving official documents that your loan had been paid in full, or cancelled... and you sit on them.
If the Earth falls under control of the unified government (not any time soon, I presume) then off-planet sites will become the next tax haven (and not only due to the tax.) As a certain princess said once, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Free people and free corporations simply will not agree to unfair taxation.
How are the tax havens doing financially when corporations just register their companies there for the low rates and don't actually hire anyone aside from the guy that checks the PO box?
They are at very least getting the income from the rent of the PO box and taxes from the salary of the guy who checks the mail. Those monies would otherwise be not there at all. In reality there are more people involved; and since those tax-free havens are small countries, this constitutes a serious creation of jobs. Those companies need banks, modern communication, some offices (even small ones.) You cannot process a $1B of income without having at least some accountants there. There is absolutely no drawback for the host country.
Sure; and sucking it up prevents you from hiring an additional employee. Instead the money goes to the government where it will be most likely wasted on one boondoggle or another. Last time I checked, there is not a single country in the world that even plans to attack the USA by means of armed forces - and there haven't been any since 1941. Still, the USA maintains the second largest army on the planet (second only to China, whose population is 4 times as large.) Why should the business pay for this army when it is perfectly clear to anyone with a brain that this expense is pointless at best, but commonly disastrous because it allows politicians to bomb other countries for no particular reason?
These taxes that you pay are also redirecting the money from people who want to work (but there are no jobs for them) to people who don't want to work at all. This promotes laziness in the society. In the end nobody will be working, and everyone will be demanding his daily bread. Where will that bread come from?
Nobody should reject reasonable taxes that are responsibly spent on the needs of the community (such as the country.) However taxes today are anything but reasonable, and they are not responsibly spent. The whole idea of armed presence in Iraq, for example, resulted in something that could have been achieved by just blowing Saddam up in his palace, with just one warhead (if you really were that itching to kill him - don't know what for.) In the end we have exactly the same outcome: another strongman.
Maybe your business doesn't use roads, but chances are your customers do.
Roads are paid for by road users; they pay for them through fuel taxes and through operating licenses. If your business needs UPS to deliver the goods, be sure that UPS is taxed through the nose for their fleet of trucks. Everyone only should pay for services that he actually consumes. If someone wants to also pay into a common insurance fund, they are welcome to do so - but the government should have no part in that.
there needs to be consequences for the misdemeanors
Wouldn't it be more logical to charge the people who use the court services? If John and Jane are having a divorce, why should Oracle pay for that?
You can't just pick individual elements out and pretend the world would be the same.
The world shouldn't be the same. As it is, the business in the "first world" countries is dying, smothered by the red tape. It is already more profitable to not work there than to work. This world has no future; but China, with its aggressive and largely unrestrained economy, had a lot of success already, and will be the next leader of the world within a decade. The USA will be known as the old, useless men with a beggar's bowl in one hand and a nuclear missile in another. (This will not last, by the way.)
F/OSS solutions are not accepted by businesses as much as one would hope for one simple reason: they are not as good as commercial offerings. You see, a business is *perfectly willing* to pay money for a tool of the trade. Saving money and getting a substandard tool is not a sufficient enticement, especially after people try and get burned.
The license cost is paid once, not every year. A volume license is well under $100. Note that the chair that the worker sits on costs more than that. Don't even ask about the Cisco VoIP telephone on the desk - it's $500, and there are no volume licenses on hardware. And don't even go into how much the cube itself costs - a few $K - and what is the cost of the building that you work at (to construct it and to pay property taxes on.) See the light above the cube? $500 to have it installed and wired, and it burns energy every working day. See the air vent in the wall? It connects to an A/C unit on the roof, it costs $50K and it consumes megawatt-hours over the course of the summer. Those are expenses; your puny MS Office license is not even on the radar; it's like pen and paper.
One can write a book to properly elaborate. I don't have time for that:-) So I will only list a few typical problems: key management, access control, dependability of ciphers, reliability of storage, opponent's access to the ciphertext for cracking... and there are many more. Whenever you open up another avenue of attack you are exposing your business to more and more liability. That's why it is usually easier to restrict the documents to a few trusted systems - and keep those systems trusted.
In business with the government there are laws that simply forbid you, the contractor, to store government documents in any way, shape or form that is different from what the law says. If the law says it must be a GSA-certified safe, that's what you use. Try to scan that classified document, encrypt with PGP and upload to Google Drive - you will find yourself in prison if anyone finds out.
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You need to explain to the population of Earth (or to the population of the USA) what exactly they will *personally* gain from all this. Considering that they will get nothing, I just don't see where the budget for this space opera would come from.
This society is not ready for operations in space and on other planets simply because there is no reason to do so, outside of a very far-fetched possibility of the global catastrophe. But even then who will be dying happily, knowing that there are a few Earthlings on the Moon?
That colony on the Moon will not be self-sustaining for a very long time. You could build a far better colony on the bottom of an ocean. If your robots can't operate in water and gather food that just swims by then those same robots probably can't operate 300 Mm away on the Moon, where the spare parts can't be delivered within a few hours.
The problem of purpose will be very severe on the Moon. You probably will have to stock the colony with astronomers, theoretical physicists, and other people who benefit from vacuum or do not care. Nor will they care for human interaction because there won't be much of that in a small group. If the colonists are only tasked with menial jobs of miners and drivers then very soon people will start asking themselves "Why I am here and what I am doing?"
The conditions on the Moon are so harsh that pretty much any malfunction of life support is fatal. But spacesuits and vehicles do not last forever, especially when the nearest spare is on another planet. Go out, tear the spacesuit and die. Go out, break the faceplate and die. Go out, have the battery short out, lose air and heat and die. Do not go out, have a crack in the wall, lose air and die. There are too many ways to die - the colony will be facing some serious attrition, unless they constrain themselves to the insides of a strong pressure vessel. That won't work because the colony has to use outside resources and materials to be partially self-supporting. It may quickly devolve into another reality show, with very real dead bodies. What is the purpose of all this?
Now they threaten any (developed) country that attempts to protect its workers in exactly the same manner, and we're supposed to just suck it up as we're reduced to poverty and the .1% go from controlling half the wealth in the country to controlling three quarters of it?
Corporations are not people. They are abstract, mathematical entities. Your complaint has as much weight as the one about water flowing downhill. Nobody is forced to form a corporation here, and nobody is forbidden from forming a corporation there. How do you fight that? If you make it economically inefficient to open a company in the USA ... guess what, there won't be any new companies open in the USA. This already happened to the established businesses, and the businesses reacted predictably - they opened overseas branches and moved all the work there. Plenty of commercial buildings in the USA stand vacant, with not a worker in sight.
Or, to put it in other terms, how much beating do you need to do until the morale improves?
for a great many people, their jobs have been sent out of the country by the "job creators."
The job creators did not send your job abroad because they hate you. They did that because the foreign country offered them better terms. You lost on the global labor market.
You don't need advanced anything to install Linux. You only need to buy the compatible hardware - not the one that is locked down to become an entertainment console and a telescreen in one neat package.
What stops you from connecting a JTAG pod and reflashing the UEFI BIOS, replacing it with a copy of GRUB, for example? As long as the hardware is not crippled until some magic occurs between the CPU and the TPM, you should be able to run your code right from the reset vector.
But my comment was about suitability of a form factor to the lifestyle of the digital rebel. You carry a phone, but not a desktop. Even my parents rarely turn the desktop on after they got a new Nexus 7 tablet. They only need a browser, Skype and Foliant. Everything else is an unwanted complexity that is only likely to fail.
And yes, I was aware of that short story by RMS.
So which is it, can you make me a LGA1155 socket motherboard or can't you? Or did you mean "any CPU you want, as long as it's an ancient and outdated one with open specs"?
I can make any motherboard, with LGA1155 or any other socket - or with direct attachment of a CPU that is packaged as a BGA. Why not? It's not rocket science. The pin grid is 0.91 mm, which is pretty generous today. My last BGA design involved a part with a 0.5 mm pitch; that was expensive. You may want to have Intel's reference designs, but they are obtainable today, and I have some for Atom (because that's what I need.) The DDRx routing will have to be carefully done, but that's also not an impossible task. I built 20A, 0.9V polyphase power supplies before, for a PowerPC project. There is hardly anything else that is notable.
But super-fast and super-hot motherboards of this kind are not what the digital rebel needs, IMO. He needs a small, lightweight, portable system - a tablet would be ideal, especially if it accepts external attachments like the monitor and USB. In reality all modern tablets are already suitable for the task. Communication, not data crunching, is the primary use of computers today - and any low-power system can do it just as well as a hot desktop.
Another reason for a digital rebel to not depend on Intel is that Intel can be asked (or forced) to make sure that their CPUs don't even start until they authenticate with the BIOS. You can build such a system already. For example, the CPU will refuse to access most of its address space until it issues a challenge to the BIOS (or TPM) and receives a correct response. The pre-auth mode would be just good enough to boot up, but if you need to run an OS you need the CPU unlocked. The private key to the CPU is in the mask, and the chances of getting to it are nearly zero.
In this situation it is essential to have an entirely free CPU design that is not constrained by artificial barriers. There are already lots of good CPUs that are ready for an FPGA. If there is a need, a SoC can be synthesized from existing RTL components and then manufactured as an ASIC. If that is illegal, use FPGA and program your own bitstream. Either way, computers are here to stay, and the only way to restrict access to them is not technical but social (like public beheading of underground engineers.)
Which will trend to zero very rapidly.
If there is a demand there will be the offer. I will personally make m/boards for you that run whatever CPU you want and use whatever booting technology you want. If you insist I can use an entirely FPGA-based design that is 100% F/OSS. It may not be as good as an Intel CPU, but it will work.
OpenCores Projects
The only way to block this is to make it illegal. But I cannot imagine how you can make microcontrollers illegal today. Would I need a license to own a debugger or a soldering iron?
Don't enrage your boss, by making excuses, by essentially lying to his face and assuming he is stupid enough to believe your drivel.
In this case there was only one (1) email from Mauro to Rafael. Linus jumped into this thread all by himself. Mauro tried to defend his patch, and he was technically wrong because the patch had unwanted side effects. But you don't publicly call a person an idiot for a single technical error. If I were Mauro's manager, at very least I would have asked him, in private, "Why did you think this is a good patch? Did you have your reasons? Let's talk about them. Or maybe you were tired, or sick? Things happen, I know that. Let's discuss what went wrong."
I'll bet Linus was more pissed off at having his intelligence insulted with this lame excuse
It is both, actually. Linus's email attacks both the technical solution and the Mauro's reaction.
But if I were to start throwing chairs whenever my intelligence is insulted by something I read on the Internet, I'd run out of chairs pretty soon.
If he humbled himself to every fool, and every fool's excuses Linux code would be crap.
Does the phrase "speak softly and carry a big stick" ring any bell? Aside from the political connotations, it points out that your influence is not determined by how much red in the face you can become. Your influence is determined by how much power you wield. Linus has the power; he had no reason, or even right, to publicly scream profanities at a coder who had a single case of poor judgement. Nobody has a right to verbally assault another person; it's an abuse:
Verbal abuse is the use of words to cause harm to the person being spoken to. It is difficult to define and may take many forms. Similarly, the harm caused is often difficult to measure. The most commonly understood form is name-calling. Verbal abuse may consist of shouting, insulting, intimidating, threatening, shaming, demeaning, or derogatory language, among other forms of communication.
Perpetrators of verbal abuse often misuse their authority and prey on those in a subordinate position. Victims of verbal abuse are often told they are to blame for the abuser's behavior and reluctant to take action to end the abuse. Verbal abuse may lead to stress, depression, physical ailments, and other damage.
There is also the legal aspect of workplace harassment. It may be a crime in California.
There are many good thoughts in what you have written. But you are asking:
So, some part of me wonders, is Linus getting angry because the current kernel architecture is hitting its design limits and he does not want to admit that?
I read the single email from Linus, and this email created an impression that Linus requires kernel maintainers to be flawless in all aspects. They must not make technical mistakes - and they must not make mistakes about handling those technical mistakes. Linus is angry about both these points.
As a manager, Linus is wrong here on both counts. People always make mistakes; they always were making them, and they always will. The manager should accept that, and manage those mistakes to minimize them. Why Mauro got defensive about his decision? Perhaps he was *afraid* of being shouted at by Linus? That is one side effect of the policy of management by throwing chairs - your subordinates begin hiding the problems. A smart manager would create an atmosphere where it is perfectly safe - and even encouraged - to share the current list of problems. This particular deal is not worth a single burned up nerve cell. OK, they had a bad patch and it broke an experimental kernel (which exists to test just for those situations.) They had a poorly coded testing tool. Those are technical issues, and they should be dealt with accordingly. If the maintainer is consistently delivering buggy patches then Linus may want to revoke his commit rights. If this was a single oversight, for whatever reason, it is sufficient that the guilty person accepts the responsibility. Throwing chairs is never a solution, it only shows your weakness to your subordinates (your anger is your weakness because it overrides your reasoning.) In the world of Bondian supervillains the deadliest one is always calm and quiet; and the one that blows up at every opportunity is most likely an idiot.
Lisias already mentioned Brazil, but their approach is not unique. If you scream at me and publicly call me an idiot, I do not even want to know why you did so and whether you had any good reason. The tone will dominate the emotions; a screaming man is likely an enemy to be fought. Few people can be emotionally ready for a fight and at the same time sufficiently cold-blooded to hear the message. Screaming at a subordinate is a direct threat of violence, and you can easily trace that down to the animal kingdom. I do not approve violence against my workers. If they are smart enough they will understand my message that is delivered in a calm voice. If they are not smart enough, they are at a wrong job.
And here is the management problem. Harsh tone distracts from the message. You may start with a true manufacturing issue, but pretty soon words will be said that shouldn't have been said; a minute later teeth start flying. Do you think if you and your worker maim each other you will be still on friendly terms, always ready to discuss a work process? I don't expect that to be the case; far more likely you both would have to watch your backs.
Many commenters (dbIII in particular) said that some groups of workers do not understand polite language and treat everything as optional until they are shouted at. I was working a few days at construction sites (as an artifact of higher education in the old USSR) but I haven't seen managers *shouting* at workers. As I said elsewhere, construction workers are not weaklings in -12.0 glasses, they can shout back and they can hit back - and on many sites workers are operating far apart, so whoever survives tells *his* story. Sure, managers were talking 100% profanity there, but that wasn't offensive, it was the normal way to communicate among that crowd, it was their standard vocabulary.
Perhaps, as dbIII mentions, there are still places and times when you, as a manager, have to scream and shout and throw chairs. I must say I never worked in such places. If my manager would ever dare to offend me, at best I would walk out of the place in the nearest ten seconds. For some reason that was never needed, and managers always found a way to communicate their state of mind without insulting employees.
It could be that my experience is uncommon in the industry. The industry is large - you have theoretical physicists on one end and you have coal miners on another. You have a mistake where a researcher puts a digit in a wrong place and skews the measurement by 0.05%, which requires a repeat measurement at expense of five minutes. You also have a mistake when the miner inserts the explosive charges incorrectly and is about to kill everyone around. Those are different cases, and different words may be suitable. I do not know how they work down there. But I am well acquainted with the environment of engineering labs and cubes, and we never shouted at each other. As matter of fact, such shouting would be a serious offense per company's HR rules. Hostile work atmosphere, that's how it is called. No manager would ever dare to go there. And they never had to. Engineers have affinity to logic, they can be easily explained what their options are. You only need to talk to them, in person. There is nothing in that talk that you need external witnesses for.
I've had subordinates where in response to a mistake, if my voice wasn't at least 3dB louder than normal with the word "fuck" liberally inserted into my speech, what I said wouldn't be taken seriously and the specific problem would continue.
I must confess that if I had to have such an employee he would be fired. I would never raise my voice or use the words that such a person could comprehend. That is in part because I am not able to be that intimidating, and in part because that would not be good for the rest of the team. Rephrasing a well known expression, "Never quarrel with an old boss - if he is not strong enough to fight you he will fire you."
I was able to get away with my limitations because I operate in a relatively polite world of engineering. I would never make it even to the lowliest rung of the management ladder in construction. But I will not scream at anyone.
IMHO, this is the exact attitude that got Linus pissed off.
Of course a mere apology will not do. Only the classical seppuku, flawlessly executed with a tanto, will be somewhat sufficient.
Hmm, I don't know about that.
You would have to research more than just reading Linus's email to learn that. If you are a programmer yourself this is what you would naturally do. If you are an HR person you just dump the resume - there are many more, and none of those applicants are screamed at by Linus! They must be real good then! :-)
Instead of screaming and cursing at him, or ordering that he be fired or otherwise punished, the pilot said something like, "I bet you're not going to do that again, are you? Now fix my goddamned plane."
This is the approach that I'm advocating here. Rage is usually pointless unless you are willing to beat the guy into a pulp. Screaming does not matter; actions do. Screaming only works when the physical violence is a real possibility. Today it is not. Unless you are him.
if I may be so bold as to politely ask?
But note that D'Artagnan's behavior was above and beyond what any aristocrat of the time would do; it was laughably so - an overcompensation for the color of his horse, as I recall :-)
See, here's the thing I don't get. Why would you be deeply offended? They are just words. Change and get better. It's no big deal.
It is something that is very individual. D'Artagnan, on approach to Paris, was extremely sensitive to any imaginary offense. But a lowly peasant of the same era would be meek to the point of "Thank you, Sir - may I have another?" These differences exist today just as they existed hundreds of years ago. Almost all of them are cultural.
As far as I can tell, he's been going about his kernel programming business as normal since then
Good for him then. He made his decision. It concerns no one else.
You don't tell a welder that their weld is just not quite right and to please do it again if it's not too much trouble. You tell them it's fucked and to grind it out and do it again before everything falls down and kills someone.
I'm not sure how you manage your welders, but I would go about like this:
"Bill, this bead is too shallow. It won't bear the load. The bottom of the weld is cold, and there is no metal there. You will have to grind it out and redo. This weld will be inspected with X-ray to make sure you do it right this time. We will have to pay you overtime, by law, for this. But if you do it again there will be no overtime - you will get your final check instead. The reason is that if these welds fail someone will be killed. It is that important. Please do your best."
This explains the problem, explains what to do to correct, and also spells out the consequences for continued bad work. It ends with an encouragement; you never want to end the conversation with a threat. But the overall content of the message is exactly the same as yours, and the welder will not feel offended. He will feel ashamed of his poor work. It won't make him happy, but by the end of the day he will know that I was right - actually, as soon as he grinds his superficial bead away and exposes the unwelded groove.
And if in my opinion the guy is hopeless I will simply summon HR to have him dismissed right away. There is no need to offend him by telling him that he is an idiot. He may well be, but it's not in my interest to infuriate people. I simply don't have a use of him anymore. Nothing personal.
In that aspect, try to not enrage your welders when you chew them up at a height of 100 storeys. It's a long fall to the ground, and people do see red when they are angry.
Clearly that is what he wanted if Mauro didn't choose to change.
If the man cannot change (you establish that in private) you simply privately advise him to quit, unless he wants to be fired. This is how it usually works in the real world. Nobody needs conflicts. The last thing you want to do is to poison the future of the person - and this rant on LKML is serving exactly that function. Every employer will easily find out that Mauro is a worthless coder (even though he is not - you don't get to become a kernel maintainer if you don't know the difference between p, &p and *p.)
Also, I'm not sure I understand why you care about honor so much. Honor from who, exactly?
Many people join F/OSS and work with others because they want to do good things and they want to be appreciated for that. There are people who like to remain in shadows, like me, but the majority wants to be known and respected. They often get that.
And here comes the public annihilation of the person's contribution and the person's skills. Linus's response says "you are an idiot, an incompetent, and you are out of here." This destroys the motivation to ever join such a bloodthirsty and vengeful crowd. Mauro lost his standing among his peers - among LKML readers and other programmers. He lost respect among many, because Linus's word and God's word are about the same.
I don't know what he will do now. There are several possibilities, and we don't have to run ahead of the events. Besides, it's not my business to plan - or watch - his life anyway. But I personally would expect a person in this situation to step away from any F/OSS work because such a person would be deeply offended. Yes, he made a mistake. But the mistake in an -RC kernel is not worth of destroying a person this way. Joseph Stalin would do that, and now Linus, but every modern manager would simply privately talk to the guilty party and explain the rules of the game. People must be respected - even those who err. Linus demonstrated (again) a horrible lack of respect for his teammate. A person may be in a wrong position, but it is *your* fault as a manager that you promoted him that high (gave him commit rights.) Even if the person makes a mistake and proves that he reached his level of incompetence, you do not publicly scream at him - this is simply inhumane. As a manager, you have better tools at your disposal.
Linus doesn't want to ever see the guy again, unless he's willing to change.
Anyone not resigning his position after such humiliation is not deserving the position just because he would have no honor. People may quit even if such a talk is given in private. Mauro probably screwed up, as it seems; but you don't trample upon people who happened to be in a wrong job - you reassign them to a job that they are competent at. The worst of it, the whole rage is pointless - Mauro is out anyway; maybe he will quit RedHat as well. Is that what Linus wanted?
It would appear that a better solution is simply to write simpler tax laws that don't create the loopholes in the first place rather than to try to patch the loopholes with more convoluted tax law. But that is so very much unlikely to happen while Congress is immune to the insider trading and securities exchange laws.
The Congress has no part in this, unless it is ready to compete with Cayman Islands on 0% corporate tax. A corporation may be started in the USA as an accident of being the initial home country of its founders. However at any point that company can be sold for $1 to a Cayman Islands corporation, and the founders will be hired (for another $1 per head) to their original positions. On the other hand, their corporate credit cards will be unlimited, and the business will generously contribute to certain trust funds that the founders have no official control over - and as such are insulated from, tax-wise.
If the EU wants to play hard ball it should impose a levy on transactions with known tax havens
Just wait until the WTO hears about it.
The problem cannot be fixed until there are independent countries that have more favorable taxation. The modern economy is getting more and more data-oriented, which makes it possible to telecommute, "working" in any remote office on the planet. Will the tax man be breaking the doors down and checking what you are doing on your home computer? If not, your salary will be safely collecting offshore, available for a transfer (or a loan!) whenever you want. Already legal; there is no law against working for free. You will probably die from old age with a few million dollars of debt to your "creditor" overseas. Alternatively, you could be periodically receiving official documents that your loan had been paid in full, or cancelled... and you sit on them.
If the Earth falls under control of the unified government (not any time soon, I presume) then off-planet sites will become the next tax haven (and not only due to the tax.) As a certain princess said once, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Free people and free corporations simply will not agree to unfair taxation.
How are the tax havens doing financially when corporations just register their companies there for the low rates and don't actually hire anyone aside from the guy that checks the PO box?
They are at very least getting the income from the rent of the PO box and taxes from the salary of the guy who checks the mail. Those monies would otherwise be not there at all. In reality there are more people involved; and since those tax-free havens are small countries, this constitutes a serious creation of jobs. Those companies need banks, modern communication, some offices (even small ones.) You cannot process a $1B of income without having at least some accountants there. There is absolutely no drawback for the host country.
As the GP said: Suck it up.
Sure; and sucking it up prevents you from hiring an additional employee. Instead the money goes to the government where it will be most likely wasted on one boondoggle or another. Last time I checked, there is not a single country in the world that even plans to attack the USA by means of armed forces - and there haven't been any since 1941. Still, the USA maintains the second largest army on the planet (second only to China, whose population is 4 times as large.) Why should the business pay for this army when it is perfectly clear to anyone with a brain that this expense is pointless at best, but commonly disastrous because it allows politicians to bomb other countries for no particular reason?
These taxes that you pay are also redirecting the money from people who want to work (but there are no jobs for them) to people who don't want to work at all. This promotes laziness in the society. In the end nobody will be working, and everyone will be demanding his daily bread. Where will that bread come from?
Nobody should reject reasonable taxes that are responsibly spent on the needs of the community (such as the country.) However taxes today are anything but reasonable, and they are not responsibly spent. The whole idea of armed presence in Iraq, for example, resulted in something that could have been achieved by just blowing Saddam up in his palace, with just one warhead (if you really were that itching to kill him - don't know what for.) In the end we have exactly the same outcome: another strongman.
Maybe your business doesn't use roads, but chances are your customers do.
Roads are paid for by road users; they pay for them through fuel taxes and through operating licenses. If your business needs UPS to deliver the goods, be sure that UPS is taxed through the nose for their fleet of trucks. Everyone only should pay for services that he actually consumes. If someone wants to also pay into a common insurance fund, they are welcome to do so - but the government should have no part in that.
there needs to be consequences for the misdemeanors
Wouldn't it be more logical to charge the people who use the court services? If John and Jane are having a divorce, why should Oracle pay for that?
You can't just pick individual elements out and pretend the world would be the same.
The world shouldn't be the same. As it is, the business in the "first world" countries is dying, smothered by the red tape. It is already more profitable to not work there than to work. This world has no future; but China, with its aggressive and largely unrestrained economy, had a lot of success already, and will be the next leader of the world within a decade. The USA will be known as the old, useless men with a beggar's bowl in one hand and a nuclear missile in another. (This will not last, by the way.)
Fuck the cheap, ugly and secure FOSS solutions.
F/OSS solutions are not accepted by businesses as much as one would hope for one simple reason: they are not as good as commercial offerings. You see, a business is *perfectly willing* to pay money for a tool of the trade. Saving money and getting a substandard tool is not a sufficient enticement, especially after people try and get burned.
The license cost is paid once, not every year. A volume license is well under $100. Note that the chair that the worker sits on costs more than that. Don't even ask about the Cisco VoIP telephone on the desk - it's $500, and there are no volume licenses on hardware. And don't even go into how much the cube itself costs - a few $K - and what is the cost of the building that you work at (to construct it and to pay property taxes on.) See the light above the cube? $500 to have it installed and wired, and it burns energy every working day. See the air vent in the wall? It connects to an A/C unit on the roof, it costs $50K and it consumes megawatt-hours over the course of the summer. Those are expenses; your puny MS Office license is not even on the radar; it's like pen and paper.
Can you elaborate?
One can write a book to properly elaborate. I don't have time for that :-) So I will only list a few typical problems: key management, access control, dependability of ciphers, reliability of storage, opponent's access to the ciphertext for cracking... and there are many more. Whenever you open up another avenue of attack you are exposing your business to more and more liability. That's why it is usually easier to restrict the documents to a few trusted systems - and keep those systems trusted.
In business with the government there are laws that simply forbid you, the contractor, to store government documents in any way, shape or form that is different from what the law says. If the law says it must be a GSA-certified safe, that's what you use. Try to scan that classified document, encrypt with PGP and upload to Google Drive - you will find yourself in prison if anyone finds out.