I like debian description better:
$ dpkg --status perl-base | grep Description
Description: The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
While at it, there is no such thing as minimal perl. It is the most addictive language I know. Once you are hooked, you are hooked. Seen it many times.
If they have an existing application to port having to do some minimal changes versus rewriting it in another language may make all the difference required for the application be ported and maintained. While I hate VB, there are tons of internal corporate code written in it and having the ability to run it on non-Windows systems is something many people will be interested in.
me wonder how many people here (obviously not everyone) have ever worked on a car or anything
Been there, done that. The hammer is the easy bit. Especially if you have the right variety and size. Now, filling it, sanding it, painting it and polishing it are the parts that are really hard and are getting harder and harder as the car paints (and panels) get more advanced.
By the way, it is interesting what kind of hammer are they using (and what is the actual content of a space station toolkit).
And this is the exact reason for the existence of the crackberry and its analogues. Some people consider it essential that any of their messages get through to you now and immediately and you read them regardless of what you are doing at the moment. This is generally the same type of people who forget that freedom of speech actually includes the freedom of not to listen. These are also the same kind of people who cannot comprehend the importance of being able to work without interruption. Hence, here is my simple program for beating email addiction (it will not work for all workflows though):
Change your workflow to read your email only at fixed intervals at fixed times during the day devoting the rest to doing work. Ensure that you are managing your time, and not email.
Turn off instant notifications, toolbar email status, cretinberries and analogues.
Once you have seen what gets missed when doing so create suitable notifications for the really important stuff that cannot and should not be missed. Make sure that important means only events that actually alter your schedule and not every email coming in.
Rinse, repeat until you get yourself up to 80%+ doing scheduled work instead of interrupt driven one.
Once you have succeeded in this you have beaten your addiction. Been there, done that.
This will do some good to energy consumption, but the jury is out as far as the overall environmental impact is concerned. The high frequency fluorescents contain all kind of environmentally unpleasant stuff in them (rare earth metals as well as electronic circuitry from the board). Personally, I do not like the idea of simply chucking them in the bin once they fail. So does Australia also intend to mandate their recycling?
Are the birth defects from exhaust from space launches,. - they are. Semipalatinsk (where the nuclear testing grounds are) is quite far away. Even the cleanest fuels like hydrogen + oxygen liquid engine generate a shedload of nitric oxides (and russians do not use that, their fuels are much more horrid). In addition to that you have all the horrid shit from solid boosters (if used). In addition to that you have all kind of nasty junk falling back onto the ground and most of it very dangerous environmentally. Here is just one example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/not_in_website/syndicat ion/monitoring/media_reports/1521728.stm (warning - while the article does not contain pictures, I would recommend not to read it on a full stomach, you may end up "loosing" your lunch). Plenty of others. No thanks, if USA has a mad desire to have that, USA can really have that all to themselves, I would rather pass on this one.
I apologise for the obvious questions. I probably should not ask them from someone who obviously has not thought what he is talking about:
1. And what specifically prevents Russians from buying back American components?
That is besides acts of congress which prohibit American companies to sell them.
2. What is the expense ratio between payload/carrier? What fraction of it is R&D and what is the proportion left in each country?
Launching is very very dirty business. Just ask anyone in Kazahstan down the prevailing wind direction from Baikonur. In fact if all long-term environmental damage is accounted for the launch fees may not even recoup themselves. Even discarding environmental damage (and all the children with missing limbs and other birth defects in Kazahstan) the profit from launch is minimal. In addition to that the launch business has very low feed back into R&D and education. All R&D has been done and dusted very long ago. It is a classic vertical market. Most money goes to 2-3 major military related contractors for the implementation after which it is "burned" at launch with minimal positive economic impact.
Now let's compare this to the payload development and manufacturing - most of it is R&D which means money is left in the country. Most of it is high tech high payed jobs which means that the average standard of living in the country increases. It is also a business with a very large number of small and medium size subcontractors and relationship with the academia which feeds a lot of people and produces investment back in education. A lot of that money ends up producing developments that are useable elsewhere with extra positive economic impact.
Frankly, as a half Russian I can say that the US is more than welcome to keep the launch business to themselves. It is a dirty unavoidable necessity, like dirty nappies when dealing with a baby. Helping a kid grow up is fun, and if this means dealing with dirty nappies, so be it. Now, wanting do deal just with the ditrty nappies for a token sum of money that does not even reflect their disposal cost, that is masochism. No thanks.
Here went my moderation to this thread, but sod with it.
The original article apparently was published in Cell. I am not subscribed to it so I cannot verify that right away, but I am assuming this to be true. If the stuff passed peer review it would have been published in something at that level.
There is an ongoing joke in molecular biology (for the last 10 years). "If you publish once in Cell you can happily retire". Compared to Cell, Science or Nature are yellow corner newshop rags. Also, if it was published in Cell, they are going to be getting money regardless of the patents. All major foundations follow it. There is another joke amidst the molecular biology crowd: "If you publish once in Cell you will never have to ask for funding till you retire, it will come to you". So I would not worry about lack of sponsorship by major pharmaceuticals either.
There is a very good joke going the rounds nowdays:
Q: What is a science department in an American University?
A: This is a place where Russian professors teach Chinese and Indian students in English.
On a more serious note, while I am not a big fan of the US University education, it is considerably better than the high school one. In fact, it is better to a degree, where science courses have to be backfilled by foreigners as the high schools simply do not produce enough students for those. The few courses like chemistry and biology that get filled up with Americans to a 90%+ level are because of prerequisites for medical school and very few of the students continue past the minimal pre-med requirement.
Overall, the problem with lack of interest to science and engineering lays with the US and UK high schools. They are going from wrong to wrong.
You are misplacing your blame here mate. The blame is with pseudomanager wannabees, not coders.
In order to use someone's else code you have to perform some research, evaluate it and even do a few proof of concept runs. Once this has been done you generally have to freeze the third party code as a part of your platform and develop on the frozen version. You also have to reevaluate this third party code before planning every release cycle. Research, evaluation, poc and maintenance of said third party code takes resources. It also takes some serious knowledge and experience as the person who does that needs to be able to tell good code from bad as on him depends the entire project.
The telltale signs of a wannabee beginner promoted into management who does not have a clue are:
They do not allocate the time for research and poc work at all or allocate clearly insufficient time.
They do not freeze the platform components so that the developers have a clear understanding on top of what they develop.
They do not allocate time to maintain the frozen components and perform evaluation of newer versions before planning new releases. As a result old, buggy and bad third party code is used release after release.
They consider any code but the one produced by them (or their project) inferior and look ait it with derison. To demonstrate that, instead of assigning the most senior and experienced coders to platform/third party evaluation they assign the most junior ones. These usually do not have enough knowledge and experience to distinguish good code from bad.
Worst of all, after failing with third party code once due to their managerial incompetence they fall back to "not invented here, let's reinvent the wheel" instead of correcting themselves (or being fired, which they rightfully deserve).
The outer Mongolia is the region to which every single major Eurasian human migration can be traced. Before DNA techniques, language techniques and historical references have been used to trace these migrations.
Most of that has now been confirmed using DNA. There was a number of waves going as far back as the Dorian invasion which overthrew the bronze age greek civilisations and established what 500 years later became the golden age greece. This was followed by gotts, westgotts, barbarians, huns, bulgarians, etc. All of them displaced from outer mongolia a few centuries before they ended up in Europe.
The early waves were speaking indo-european languages and with distinct caucasian appearance. The last ones (huns and pra-bulgarians) were speaking languages from the Turk language group and were of mongoloid appearance.
So finding a blond or even a redhead in mongolia is not suprising. After all Chengis Khan was a redhead.
My observations are completely opposite. CS courses are getting more applied, not less.
As far as the decline in CS it is due to other reasons. It is a logical combination of the steady decline of math in schools in Western Europe (and especially English speaking) combined with systematic stampout of the freedom to tinker. It is the same in CS, physics and chemistry.
In chemistry the kids are no longer interested because the lessons are terminally dull and no "bum-bum" is ever allowed to happen.
In physics it is a combination of "no sparks allowed" and not enough math.
In CS the primary underlying reason is that the Educational establishment firmly associates computer literacy with Microsoft Word literacy and nothing else. Not suprising as they are by majority literate at just that level (and nothing more). So the students are hardly ever taught how to write two lines of code or how to produce something working. God forbid that they open the computer to see what makes it tick. And Oh horror of horrors - hacking the classroom system - that is a definitive expulsion.
As a result the kids that come out of the UK and US educational system are damaged beyond repair. The few that have not lost their interest cannot compete versus kids from the mainland Europe, Eastern Europe, Far East or even India. I am not surprised that they chose not to enter CS, physics or chemistry degrees. With the average education level provided by British and US schools facing a class (or even worse competition for jobs) versus what is produced by education systems elsewhere is a very dawnting perspective.
Math is essential to understanding the fundamentals of CS. I would not hire a software developer if he does not have at least some understanding of the fundamental math involved. Example - a few months ago I had to attend a 3G course. So for an entire day I had some stupid w***er showing me some examples with numbers, adding 1s,2s,3s, etc. I was under some heavy lemsip influence so my brain was not exactly in phase, but at the end of the day it snapped in my head that the idiot spent the entire day showing vector calculus by example and the same stuff he has been explaining can be written as a one line equation on the board and explained in 2 minutes using math. 1 day with half of the course not fully grasping it versus 2 minutes with everyone grasping it provided that they know math. And while 3G is possibly the best example as its equations can be expressed in "lamer" first year university math, there are many others. Without the knowledge of math (and more specifically probability theory) there is no way to understand complex systems. I have watched people who do not know probability theory trying to deal with a financial transaction problem where one of the steps had a non-0 failure rate. It was not even funny. Same for queueing algorithms and router/internet software development, same for any work related to Quality of Service/Class of Service, same for... Frankly, if you cannot handle math you do not belong in CS. In fact, if you are replaced by someone from abroad who does I will not even commiserate.
Speaking as a side observer (I live elsewhere, but used to work for a company headquartered in such a state) - it is a two edge sword. At the low end or during rainy days the company points a gun at your head, at the high end or in boom times you point it at the company's.
If a company has tightly knit highly productive technical teams with established personal and working relationships "at will" is bad for the company. I have seen quite a few cases when entire teams get up and go to the competition and the company is suddenly facing a total failure in a number of projects. At will allows this.
In fact the "at will" changes only the rate things happen. Realistically, if you are at the high end of the qualification scale it takes on the average 3-6 months for a company to fill the gap from you leaving. 1 minute or 2 weeks do not really change anything. Similarly, if you at the factory floor you can be replaced in under 7 days. 1 minute or two weeks once again do not really change anything.
One thing I will trust Apple to get right will be the digital signatures on the actual code and applications. In fact I can bet a big case of beer that the iPhone has PKI all over it for every single feature, piece of code and or application. So forget about any unbranded (or hacked) ROMs full stop.
Problem elsewhere. Give an average american cellco like verizon a phone with Bluetooth and Wifi and they will disable it so that you do not stray from the sacred customer experience path they have plotted for you. Especially Verizon. Actually not just american. O2 is a prime example with its XDA. It was initially released with full WiFi functionality and WEP was stripped out at a later date so you can use only free APs or 802.1x authenticated infrastructure of the kind used by large companies.
My guess is that this is a matter of policy. Apple is shipping a phone with a well defined and well advertised feature set. I may not like them, but they generally obide to their specs very strictly. Having features disabled by some cretin in the cellco bondage and discipline department (aka customer disservice) is the last thing they want (especially in a new product).
Yup. There is a word for this in the industry. It used to be called a BUGTRAQ gadfly though nowdays it should be called a "Full Disclosure Gadfly".
You make enough stink on a non-moderated list like FD with the sole purpose to get hired and you get hired. There are pimps that follow FD, BUGTRAQ and the like for "fresh talent".
Which is exactly the way I like my infrastructure. 3-6 months freeze with all bugs known, worked around or fixed in the meantime. Once I have gotten it to this point I build on top of that for the actual services which can run something very bleeding edge if necessary, but this is as I pointed out "your daily bread". For the stuff that is not, you need to be sure that it works and if you are a manager to be severely anal about it. So debian stable + 2-3 unavoidable backports and local builds is about right. This is also the reason corporations buy RedHat ES/AS/WS like hot bread. They finally see a model where the base has been frozen long enough to be relied on for building your own services.
Many itadmins and most developers have a problem with understanding of the "establish a platform and build on it" and "platform freeze before development" ideas. They think that everything is a fair game and the results (in man hours wasted on piecing everything together for release) are usually quite obvious.
And enjoy finding out that the contests are open only residents of the USA. That is besides the fact that US thinks that it laws apply anywhere on the planet (and beyond it).
In an average company you need 2-3 packages at most that need to be pushed to newer versions. If you need to maintain locally more than 3 packages for infrastructure (and you are not making a living out of it) you are doing something seriously wrong. The most likely reason is the magpie syndrom (love for all things new and shiny). Time to stand back, look at what are you doing and think: "Do I really need all these shiny latest superduper things or I can make with a verified version and a well known workaround".
If you are dealing with 2-3 packages you can do that by using backports.org or backporting yourself. If you need more and these are an essential part of the business there is no difference between portage and backporting/local packaging. In ether case they have a tendency to break and you need local developer/sysadmin time allocated to that. Portage gives you no advantage whatsoever because the resource you gain in keeping more than 3-4 packages synced to their projects HEADs you will lose in infrastructure upgrade creep. Every time I have looked at this in the past taking out the numbers out of the ticketing and workflow control systems have proven that this is the case. I have yet to see one case where this is not.
You are applying the wrong perspective. We are talking about a Canadian telecommunication company here, not the users. They have a long history here as a country. After all another Canadian company already got every single exec and 90% of the gadget freaks armed with a vibrator in their crotch area which they can after that twiddle with two thumbs to extract extra satisfaction from.
So adding some visuals to the already existing executive services is very logical.
The joy of portage all the way. Continuous upgrade versus release cycles. 15 years of dealing with both have convinced me that portage is good only in two places:
your own workstation where you want to look at how the bleeding edge looks before unleashing it on the unsuspecting user population. This one is updated continuously and rebuild as necessary.
single special purpose dedicated servers (not run of the mill 10+ servers with same load). You build these once and after that you leave them alone until they die (preferrably).
Everything in between - forget it. Update hell, dll hell, etc. If you use portage (either the BSD or Gentoo incarnation) you die and releases are the exact and only solution to this. You can stamp servers with a "released" OS out of workshop by truckload and you can be more or less confident that updates will not break a lot of things. The only problem is upgrades to next release but if you are using The One OS to rule them all even that is not a problem.
This is not any different from any other Qualcomm behaviour regarding the standards process. All I can say - a good way to start, can we have more of that.
In fact, let's hope that the Nokia 3G lawsuit and a few others that are in the queue will be decided the same way.
Experience in having 50+ of the older ones around makes me think so. The original Cubid cases had 35+db (that is for a case with a silent DC-DC converter). There was an even more horrid one at 37db. The only quiet non-home theatre case was Via Serenity and it was stopped from manufacturing for purely cartel reasons (so that via does not undercut its friends Cubid and Co).
Slashdot Mirror
I like debian description better: $ dpkg --status perl-base | grep Description Description: The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister While at it, there is no such thing as minimal perl. It is the most addictive language I know. Once you are hooked, you are hooked. Seen it many times.
If they have an existing application to port having to do some minimal changes versus rewriting it in another language may make all the difference required for the application be ported and maintained. While I hate VB, there are tons of internal corporate code written in it and having the ability to run it on non-Windows systems is something many people will be interested in.
Been there, done that. The hammer is the easy bit. Especially if you have the right variety and size. Now, filling it, sanding it, painting it and polishing it are the parts that are really hard and are getting harder and harder as the car paints (and panels) get more advanced.
By the way, it is interesting what kind of hammer are they using (and what is the actual content of a space station toolkit).
- Change your workflow to read your email only at fixed intervals at fixed times during the day devoting the rest to doing work. Ensure that you are managing your time, and not email.
- Turn off instant notifications, toolbar email status, cretinberries and analogues.
- Once you have seen what gets missed when doing so create suitable notifications for the really important stuff that cannot and should not be missed. Make sure that important means only events that actually alter your schedule and not every email coming in.
- Rinse, repeat until you get yourself up to 80%+ doing scheduled work instead of interrupt driven one.
Once you have succeeded in this you have beaten your addiction. Been there, done that.This will do some good to energy consumption, but the jury is out as far as the overall environmental impact is concerned. The high frequency fluorescents contain all kind of environmentally unpleasant stuff in them (rare earth metals as well as electronic circuitry from the board). Personally, I do not like the idea of simply chucking them in the bin once they fail. So does Australia also intend to mandate their recycling?
Also, what are people with dimmers going to do?
Are the birth defects from exhaust from space launches,. - they are. Semipalatinsk (where the nuclear testing grounds are) is quite far away. Even the cleanest fuels like hydrogen + oxygen liquid engine generate a shedload of nitric oxides (and russians do not use that, their fuels are much more horrid). In addition to that you have all the horrid shit from solid boosters (if used). In addition to that you have all kind of nasty junk falling back onto the ground and most of it very dangerous environmentally. Here is just one example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/not_in_website/syndicat ion/monitoring/media_reports/1521728.stm (warning - while the article does not contain pictures, I would recommend not to read it on a full stomach, you may end up "loosing" your lunch). Plenty of others. No thanks, if USA has a mad desire to have that, USA can really have that all to themselves, I would rather pass on this one.
I apologise for the obvious questions. I probably should not ask them from someone who obviously has not thought what he is talking about:
1. And what specifically prevents Russians from buying back American components?
That is besides acts of congress which prohibit American companies to sell them.
2. What is the expense ratio between payload/carrier? What fraction of it is R&D and what is the proportion left in each country?
Launching is very very dirty business. Just ask anyone in Kazahstan down the prevailing wind direction from Baikonur. In fact if all long-term environmental damage is accounted for the launch fees may not even recoup themselves. Even discarding environmental damage (and all the children with missing limbs and other birth defects in Kazahstan) the profit from launch is minimal. In addition to that the launch business has very low feed back into R&D and education. All R&D has been done and dusted very long ago. It is a classic vertical market. Most money goes to 2-3 major military related contractors for the implementation after which it is "burned" at launch with minimal positive economic impact.
Now let's compare this to the payload development and manufacturing - most of it is R&D which means money is left in the country. Most of it is high tech high payed jobs which means that the average standard of living in the country increases. It is also a business with a very large number of small and medium size subcontractors and relationship with the academia which feeds a lot of people and produces investment back in education. A lot of that money ends up producing developments that are useable elsewhere with extra positive economic impact.
Frankly, as a half Russian I can say that the US is more than welcome to keep the launch business to themselves. It is a dirty unavoidable necessity, like dirty nappies when dealing with a baby. Helping a kid grow up is fun, and if this means dealing with dirty nappies, so be it. Now, wanting do deal just with the ditrty nappies for a token sum of money that does not even reflect their disposal cost, that is masochism. No thanks.
Here went my moderation to this thread, but sod with it.
The original article apparently was published in Cell. I am not subscribed to it so I cannot verify that right away, but I am assuming this to be true. If the stuff passed peer review it would have been published in something at that level.
There is an ongoing joke in molecular biology (for the last 10 years). "If you publish once in Cell you can happily retire". Compared to Cell, Science or Nature are yellow corner newshop rags. Also, if it was published in Cell, they are going to be getting money regardless of the patents. All major foundations follow it. There is another joke amidst the molecular biology crowd: "If you publish once in Cell you will never have to ask for funding till you retire, it will come to you". So I would not worry about lack of sponsorship by major pharmaceuticals either.
There is a very good joke going the rounds nowdays:
Q: What is a science department in an American University?
A: This is a place where Russian professors teach Chinese and Indian students in English.
On a more serious note, while I am not a big fan of the US University education, it is considerably better than the high school one. In fact, it is better to a degree, where science courses have to be backfilled by foreigners as the high schools simply do not produce enough students for those. The few courses like chemistry and biology that get filled up with Americans to a 90%+ level are because of prerequisites for medical school and very few of the students continue past the minimal pre-med requirement.
Overall, the problem with lack of interest to science and engineering lays with the US and UK high schools. They are going from wrong to wrong.
In order to use someone's else code you have to perform some research, evaluate it and even do a few proof of concept runs. Once this has been done you generally have to freeze the third party code as a part of your platform and develop on the frozen version. You also have to reevaluate this third party code before planning every release cycle. Research, evaluation, poc and maintenance of said third party code takes resources. It also takes some serious knowledge and experience as the person who does that needs to be able to tell good code from bad as on him depends the entire project.
The telltale signs of a wannabee beginner promoted into management who does not have a clue are:
Not surprising.
The outer Mongolia is the region to which every single major Eurasian human migration can be traced. Before DNA techniques, language techniques and historical references have been used to trace these migrations.
Most of that has now been confirmed using DNA. There was a number of waves going as far back as the Dorian invasion which overthrew the bronze age greek civilisations and established what 500 years later became the golden age greece. This was followed by gotts, westgotts, barbarians, huns, bulgarians, etc. All of them displaced from outer mongolia a few centuries before they ended up in Europe.
The early waves were speaking indo-european languages and with distinct caucasian appearance. The last ones (huns and pra-bulgarians) were speaking languages from the Turk language group and were of mongoloid appearance.
So finding a blond or even a redhead in mongolia is not suprising. After all Chengis Khan was a redhead.
My observations are completely opposite. CS courses are getting more applied, not less.
As far as the decline in CS it is due to other reasons. It is a logical combination of the steady decline of math in schools in Western Europe (and especially English speaking) combined with systematic stampout of the freedom to tinker. It is the same in CS, physics and chemistry.
As a result the kids that come out of the UK and US educational system are damaged beyond repair. The few that have not lost their interest cannot compete versus kids from the mainland Europe, Eastern Europe, Far East or even India. I am not surprised that they chose not to enter CS, physics or chemistry degrees. With the average education level provided by British and US schools facing a class (or even worse competition for jobs) versus what is produced by education systems elsewhere is a very dawnting perspective.
Math is essential to understanding the fundamentals of CS. I would not hire a software developer if he does not have at least some understanding of the fundamental math involved. Example - a few months ago I had to attend a 3G course. So for an entire day I had some stupid w***er showing me some examples with numbers, adding 1s,2s,3s, etc. I was under some heavy lemsip influence so my brain was not exactly in phase, but at the end of the day it snapped in my head that the idiot spent the entire day showing vector calculus by example and the same stuff he has been explaining can be written as a one line equation on the board and explained in 2 minutes using math. 1 day with half of the course not fully grasping it versus 2 minutes with everyone grasping it provided that they know math.
And while 3G is possibly the best example as its equations can be expressed in "lamer" first year university math, there are many others.
Without the knowledge of math (and more specifically probability theory) there is no way to understand complex systems. I have watched people who do not know probability theory trying to deal with a financial transaction problem where one of the steps had a non-0 failure rate. It was not even funny. Same for queueing algorithms and router/internet software development, same for any work related to Quality of Service/Class of Service, same for...
Frankly, if you cannot handle math you do not belong in CS. In fact, if you are replaced by someone from abroad who does I will not even commiserate.
Speaking as a side observer (I live elsewhere, but used to work for a company headquartered in such a state) - it is a two edge sword. At the low end or during rainy days the company points a gun at your head, at the high end or in boom times you point it at the company's.
If a company has tightly knit highly productive technical teams with established personal and working relationships "at will" is bad for the company. I have seen quite a few cases when entire teams get up and go to the competition and the company is suddenly facing a total failure in a number of projects. At will allows this.
In fact the "at will" changes only the rate things happen. Realistically, if you are at the high end of the qualification scale it takes on the average 3-6 months for a company to fill the gap from you leaving. 1 minute or 2 weeks do not really change anything. Similarly, if you at the factory floor you can be replaced in under 7 days. 1 minute or two weeks once again do not really change anything.
No thanks. I had enough dimethilsulfide during my chemistry years at Uni. I am definitely not having that as an airfreshener.
One thing I will trust Apple to get right will be the digital signatures on the actual code and applications. In fact I can bet a big case of beer that the iPhone has PKI all over it for every single feature, piece of code and or application. So forget about any unbranded (or hacked) ROMs full stop.
Problem elsewhere. Give an average american cellco like verizon a phone with Bluetooth and Wifi and they will disable it so that you do not stray from the sacred customer experience path they have plotted for you. Especially Verizon. Actually not just american. O2 is a prime example with its XDA. It was initially released with full WiFi functionality and WEP was stripped out at a later date so you can use only free APs or 802.1x authenticated infrastructure of the kind used by large companies.
My guess is that this is a matter of policy. Apple is shipping a phone with a well defined and well advertised feature set. I may not like them, but they generally obide to their specs very strictly. Having features disabled by some cretin in the cellco bondage and discipline department (aka customer disservice) is the last thing they want (especially in a new product).
Yup. There is a word for this in the industry. It used to be called a BUGTRAQ gadfly though nowdays it should be called a "Full Disclosure Gadfly".
You make enough stink on a non-moderated list like FD with the sole purpose to get hired and you get hired. There are pimps that follow FD, BUGTRAQ and the like for "fresh talent".
Which is exactly the way I like my infrastructure. 3-6 months freeze with all bugs known, worked around or fixed in the meantime. Once I have gotten it to this point I build on top of that for the actual services which can run something very bleeding edge if necessary, but this is as I pointed out "your daily bread". For the stuff that is not, you need to be sure that it works and if you are a manager to be severely anal about it. So debian stable + 2-3 unavoidable backports and local builds is about right. This is also the reason corporations buy RedHat ES/AS/WS like hot bread. They finally see a model where the base has been frozen long enough to be relied on for building your own services.
Many itadmins and most developers have a problem with understanding of the "establish a platform and build on it" and "platform freeze before development" ideas. They think that everything is a fair game and the results (in man hours wasted on piecing everything together for release) are usually quite obvious.
And enjoy finding out that the contests are open only residents of the USA. That is besides the fact that US thinks that it laws apply anywhere on the planet (and beyond it).
In an average company you need 2-3 packages at most that need to be pushed to newer versions. If you need to maintain locally more than 3 packages for infrastructure (and you are not making a living out of it) you are doing something seriously wrong. The most likely reason is the magpie syndrom (love for all things new and shiny). Time to stand back, look at what are you doing and think: "Do I really need all these shiny latest superduper things or I can make with a verified version and a well known workaround".
If you are dealing with 2-3 packages you can do that by using backports.org or backporting yourself. If you need more and these are an essential part of the business there is no difference between portage and backporting/local packaging. In ether case they have a tendency to break and you need local developer/sysadmin time allocated to that. Portage gives you no advantage whatsoever because the resource you gain in keeping more than 3-4 packages synced to their projects HEADs you will lose in infrastructure upgrade creep. Every time I have looked at this in the past taking out the numbers out of the ticketing and workflow control systems have proven that this is the case. I have yet to see one case where this is not.
Err...
You are applying the wrong perspective. We are talking about a Canadian telecommunication company here, not the users. They have a long history here as a country. After all another Canadian company already got every single exec and 90% of the gadget freaks armed with a vibrator in their crotch area which they can after that twiddle with two thumbs to extract extra satisfaction from.
So adding some visuals to the already existing executive services is very logical.
Nothing new and surprising here, move along
The joy of portage all the way. Continuous upgrade versus release cycles. 15 years of dealing with both have convinced me that portage is good only in two places:
Everything in between - forget it. Update hell, dll hell, etc. If you use portage (either the BSD or Gentoo incarnation) you die and releases are the exact and only solution to this. You can stamp servers with a "released" OS out of workshop by truckload and you can be more or less confident that updates will not break a lot of things. The only problem is upgrades to next release but if you are using The One OS to rule them all even that is not a problem.
Well...
This is not any different from any other Qualcomm behaviour regarding the standards process. All I can say - a good way to start, can we have more of that.
In fact, let's hope that the Nokia 3G lawsuit and a few others that are in the queue will be decided the same way.
Experience in having 50+ of the older ones around makes me think so. The original Cubid cases had 35+db (that is for a case with a silent DC-DC converter). There was an even more horrid one at 37db. The only quiet non-home theatre case was Via Serenity and it was stopped from manufacturing for purely cartel reasons (so that via does not undercut its friends Cubid and Co).