This would be funnier if it weren't completely retarded. Let me draw you a map.
I've explained enough times to want to make this short, but most of the ground up here is some variant on permanently frozen. At some point, all of that is likely to melt, and subside. We Alaskans know a lot about what that looks like, because if you build in the wrong way in the wrong place, you'll be filling out your cross-stitch with "Home Sweet Bog". Houses built on permafrost are built on stilts.
Also, while the Arctic is warming at a significantly greater pace than the rest of the world (1.6 degrees C up from last century, compared with.8 degrees C globally), the winters are still going to be cold as fuck (<-40) for a long time to come.
Plus, there's <1% of the land up in Alaska that's actually owned privately. The rest is owned either by the Feds, the State, or the Natives.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Your suggestion, and its underlying premise, are so wrong-headed that it's turning my stomach. Perhaps you can go be a real estate agent in Shishmaref, or one of the other villages that we're having to relocate due to climate change. Hopefully at that point you might understand exactly what it is that is offensive about your comment.
The government does directly control the creation of money. They have delegated the extension of credit, which does "create" money, but somewhat differently. The way it works is that the government sets regulations and interest rates which directly affect how much money is created via credit in a given period, and when you want a loan, it can be from anyone that trusts you. Having to apply to the State for credit doesn't make sense, does it? What is it to them whether I am a good creditor, as long as my taxes are paid?
The "right answer" here is credit unions: nonprofit, non-governmental agencies to provide an easy source of credit. I'd even be down for some amount of subsidy for small loans. That these entities cannot compete as effectively with profit-driven entities is proving to be detrimental to society, as it encourages a truly spectacular concentration of wealth.
None of this has a lot to do with the money supply in the greater sense, and it's really not the issue. No one gives two shits about the money supply. The issue is wealth. The money game should not be able to be won by just one person all the time, and so we keep adding new rules and expanding the role of government. Half the laws on the books are about keeping people from making money by being an asshole. In this case though, (and speaking as more-or-less a socialist) the answer isn't actually that we need to absorb this function into the government. The local and international credit markets are just that, markets, and those markets serve a vast spectrum of needs, and probably most of those the government has no real business being involved in. We want instead to promote ethical entities (which may or may not be synonymous with nonprofit) in that market, and from time to time we will end up punishing extreme concentrations of wealth for being too successful.
Those who think there is something inherently wrong about that last bit should perhaps consider the moral qualities of the guillotine.
You have a wonderful career in comedy ahead of you, but just in case someone else missed the joke, Microsoft accounts for a little over 0.1% ($3.1B) of what the IRS collects. If they didn't have a massive amount of tax shelters, they would get up to a whopping 0.2% ($5.5B) of tax revenues. This is not exactly small potatoes, but the idea that the IRS has some major financial stake in MS's profit margins is farcical. It's not like the IRS gets a cut of the take anyway; their budget is set by Congress for the most part. Lastly, if the IRS were really interested in increasing revenues, there's an estimated 6.8% of revenues ($166B) lying around in corporate tax shelters.
Waitasec. Open source companies don't pay taxes in your world? Forget what I said, sign me up for your newsletter!
bad review != advertisement. Especially for a product that isn't commercial. Parent poster is talking about them hoping to eventually make money off of the attention. If that's an advertisement, so is everything on slashdot.
What's your alternative? Hand rolling everything? God forbid that someone provide a useful, open-source utility and try to sell support services for it.
Yes, everything should be provided free of charge in all forms, relying only on donations, or just that good feeling of having provided something useful. No sarcasm, and yes, I have my money where my mouth is. I get paid for my time, not for the code I write, and I would consider it personally immoral to do otherwise. If you think that making money off of open source code is wrong, however, you have just put yourself in the category of "more of a zealot than RMS." In other words, you are so far off in looney land as to be utterly divorced from reality. You are so far gone that you're actually a counterexample to Poe's Law.
I can't construct a formal reductio ad absurdum to show that you're a backbiting assmonkey whose ideas hurt open source, but I will let the examples of Google, Red Hat, Canonical, Github, SourceForge, Intel, and the vast number of for-profit business entities that have made the Open Source movement a powerful force in the software market speak for themselves.
It's possible that non-compete agreements might an issue, but those are frequently unenforceable and, if some employee signs an employment contract containing one, it's prima facie evidence that they are too dumb to be worth hiring anyway. Failing to have a competent lawyer review your employment contract is also a bad move; it's unlikely that the lawyer will cost anywhere near as much as the contract is worth.
Can you tell I am a contractor? I really need to just write some angry contract-related blog posts and get it out of my system.
I worked in game programming several years back, and 1TB was quite reasonable. Branching meant IT would bring everyone a new hard drive to store the new branch on.
Git just isn't designed for huge repos full of binary blobs.
Apparently neither is Perforce/SVN. More to the point, I am aware of no sound basis for that statement. Git does binary diffs just fine, and compresses the data when reasonable, and stores file deltas where that is more efficient. Cherry-picking a change to a binary file sounds painful, but it's likely that's a stupid idea that would not be tenable in any RCS. If there is some secret limitation to how git stores files, I'd love to hear about it. My suspicion is that this "svn is better for large repos" idea is being promoted by people who have either not used git at all, or do not understand how it works internally.
Imagine you wrote a song, filmed a short video or created this amazing illustration and 5 years later it was used by corporations to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. How would you feel about that?
Fucking fantastic.
I would never have to worry about finding work as an artist again. I might have to worry about working again but so it goes.
I have a very clear idea of what this book is about and what it covers, and in what level of detail. It does indeed seem like a good introduction to the subject. Thank you for writing this, and of course for your other reviews.
Minus an atmosphere, and assuming.3 albedo (based on satellite measurements), the Earth would be about -18 degrees C (255 K). The average surface temperature of the Earth is currently around 14.5 degrees C. The atmosphere traps enough heat energy to take the entire globe from deep freeze to balmy. Geothermal and tidal heating account for pretty negligible amounts of heating.
So, two points: one, the amount of energy involved is rather large, and a small percentage change is going to have a huge effect. Secondly, heating the atmosphere changes its content. The atmosphere is more or less saturated with water vapor, and any increase in temperatures increases the amount of water that it can contain. We can't do anything about how much water is on the planet, for reasons that should be obvious. On the other hand, we're really great at making CO2. A naive calculation would indicate that you can increase temperatures almost arbitrarily by adding CO2, in fact.
Oh hey look there's a textbook that has this same objection explained in detail. Apparently your objection was addressed in the 1950s. Whoops.
What's that? Facebook produces bad software? Say it ain't so.
This story should be titled, "Facebook's Mobile Team Continues to Suck". These guys were able to put together a half-decent Facebook app, for the noble purpose of demonstrating that Zuckerberg is completely ignorant of technology.
Install scripts, mostly dev stuff. Apache, mysql, postgres. There's a nice default gui. If there is another debian + openbox + web dev install scripts distro that I am unaware of, or if you've got your own custom debian image, then maybe this isn't that useful.
Probably if dpkg works for you, you aren't their target audience.
How quickly you accelerate is almost certainly going to be the biggest factor in fuel efficiency. There are optimizations beyond that, though, as you point out. I adjusted the way I drive after reading this article about hypermilers.
If you drive carefully, you can get mileage that exceeds EPA estimates. If you don't drive carefully, you're probably not saving a lot of travel time, and your mileage is pretty much going to be terrible. You don't need to be Speed Racer every time you sit behind a wheel. Eventually market forces will limit that ability to the privileged class anyway, but until then you're pretty much a douche for speeding.
The test should be redesigned, but you all are missing the consequences. You only have so much power in your gas tank, and F = ma means that you really only have a couple good options for improving MPG. There's a limit to how much you can reduce the mass, so manufacturers will start limiting the rate that you can accelerate at. If you have driven a Prius, you know what I am talking about.
Personally, I'm not in a hurry, and I figure time spent accelerating is probably going to be a small component of total travel time. The rest of you should be aware of what you're asking for.
Such an approach could be advantageous to ambitious workers who may work on two or three projects simultaneously, presuming, of course, no conflict of interest.
Unless the company in question is a consultancy itself, there should not be a conflict of interest. Nor is there any justification for restrictive covenants. To my mind, that is nothing more than a power play, and as a contractor I am in an equal bargaining position.
You seemingly don't understand the purpose of employees vs contractors. You get to spread a number of costs out among your employees. Contract negotiation is a pain in the butt, among other things. Also, when I am setting my rates, I pass on any expenses due to down time, or employee training, or materials, directly on to the customer, with markup. There's no free lunch.
Finally, while it is theoretically possible to schedule your time to be able to take on multiple contracts at once, there is a lot of overhead in task-switching. You're not an employee any more, you're a business entity, so that means that you also need to be HR, an accountant, a lawyer, and a salesman, or employ people to do these things for you. It is possible to wear all of those hats and juggle three or more contracts, but it is far from easy.
If it's a product, then I own it after I have paid for it, and can do with it as I please.
If you are instead insisting on ownership of the *idea* and not a specific representation thereof, as copyright does, then this is an artificial, novel, and harmful construction.
I might add, you have no idea what socialism is, and the 'free market' types generally don't like government-enforced monopolies.
Right, because there's some sort of profit motive here that we should be serving. Some guy's business is going to get ahold of this and that will make all of us (shareholders) rich, rich, rich!
Let's point out that there are slightly bigger barriers to entry in the space exploration market than in the internet market. And if there's one thing in the world that isn't going to get smaller and more efficient with time, it's a gravity well. At least until we develop a space elevator. So the market is guaranteed to be in control of a few large players -- most likely only one -- and make most of its money off of government agents. The cynical part of me suggests that this is exactly the role that Musk wants to inhabit.
For any industry, the amount of competition is directly proportional to the cost to enter the market. Space exploration is at about the level where billionaires and people with the net worth of a small country can play around with it. More or less on the public dime. So, just like the internet.
I'll skip the discussion of what exactly there is in space to make money off of. Without the possibility of competition, a large profit potential would just make things worse.
It's not because we want it to be difficult. It's that we want it to be useful. If you keep on bumping up your feature count, you will eventually get to a point where what you have done is create a bad programming language (all programming languages are bad programming languages, but it goes double for GUI-based ones).
Programming is more or less the ultimate tool for telling a computer what to do. It is also more or less directly opposed to simplicity. Linux is optimized for utility. You can use it to create a simple interface to the computer, at which point we generally stop calling it Linux, but you cannot simultaneously optimize in two opposite directions. You cannot build a computer appliance using the tools contained within that appliance.
Designing interfaces is all about managing complexity. Most linux distributions opt for more complexity/utility rather than less. There is some complexity for complexity's sake, and some complexity for historical reasons, but utility is the driving force. And Linux users will get very upset at anything that detracts from that utility, as seen in (among other flamewars) the Wayland vs X11 debates.
In the morning, I love the smell of loving the smell of loving the smell of recursion.
I think to be recursive, your verbs need to refer to themselves. You know? I know that you know. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know what I'm talking about.
I am loving that I am loving that I am loving the smell of recursion in the sentence.
When working with designs meant for screen printing, the original artwork was done in RGB, then a team would separate the color channels (in Photoshop), one channel per ink to be used. They could technically do CMYK directly, but it didn't look good for a wide variety of purposes -- you can imagine a flat-filled cartoon character would be pretty much impossible. It would look a bit like comic book halftoning, probably. The shop would use that when they wanted to print Thomas Kincaide-esque sweatshirts for grannies. They would also use additional channels for things that weren't colors, like adhesive (for foil, usually) and clear inks.
I don't imagine that having more than three or four color channels is a new thing, or difficult to deal with. I would imagine even the prosumer technology would allow you to choose between various rendering intents. Probably the color separation is handled at the driver or device level, but TIFF, PDF, and DCS 2.0 (??) should handle extra channels natively.
A few more details on screen printing for those who might care: The actual screen printing process was not computer-controlled as a rule. The smaller shops I worked at printed a transparency which was transferred onto the screen by a photographic process, but the large one had a computer-controlled airjet "printer" that would knock out the design. Usually they would do a few samples by hand, to work out what ink and screen combination to use (different mesh sizes and ink thicknesses produce slightly different effects), and adjust finer details like when you would "flash" the shirt. That is, hitting it with a very high powered xenon lamp for a few seconds to dry the ink, before applying a new layer. You could do some interesting painterly effects with wet-on-wet ink; you can also make a hell of a mess that way. Flashing also tends to affect the color somewhat, especially for temperature-sensitive inks. After you get a few good samples, you send them off to the client as a proof. Then you would set up your automatic press for a run of a couple hundred. Color balance was something that the press operator kept an eye on after that point. After printing, the shirts are sent through a 400 degree open oven on a conveyor belt, for perhaps 10-20 seconds, to cure the ink.
Very fun job, the ink is messy as hell. I would still be doing it, but working with computers pays better.
There comes a point where there is no readily identifiable "best" strategy. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in either direction. Perhaps one persons says, "the rule of thumb that holds for the common case, doesn't apply here." Perhaps there are valid differences about what goal to optimize for -- it is a law of the universe that you can't optimize in all directions at once.
At some point the only way to decide the issue one way is to fork the code and see what becomes popular. As an outsider, you don't really have a good perspective on whether this is justifiable. Clearly the magic code factory has stopped for the moment, but coding efforts are probably stalled more often than not. I started on a new project a few weeks ago, and I don't expect to be doing anything but refactoring and bug fixes for several weeks to come. And if I decided that it was just as much trouble to start over with a bare set of classes and do things the way I think they should have been done the first time, are you going to call me out on it? Is there any better proof of the viability of that strategy but in the execution? Perhaps this will be a better performing or more feature-ful product, and perhaps not, but if the only thing learned from the experience is that "doing it this way turned out to be a bad idea," that still counts as a win in my book.
A failure is something you don't learn anything from.
Lastly, as counterproductive as a fork may be, it's nowhere near as hard to merge changes as it would be if the guy had just started a whole new project. Which is the biggest reason to cry foul over Canonical's development efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be funnier if it weren't completely retarded. Let me draw you a map.
I've explained enough times to want to make this short, but most of the ground up here is some variant on permanently frozen. At some point, all of that is likely to melt, and subside. We Alaskans know a lot about what that looks like, because if you build in the wrong way in the wrong place, you'll be filling out your cross-stitch with "Home Sweet Bog". Houses built on permafrost are built on stilts.
Also, while the Arctic is warming at a significantly greater pace than the rest of the world (1.6 degrees C up from last century, compared with .8 degrees C globally), the winters are still going to be cold as fuck (<-40) for a long time to come.
Plus, there's <1% of the land up in Alaska that's actually owned privately. The rest is owned either by the Feds, the State, or the Natives.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Your suggestion, and its underlying premise, are so wrong-headed that it's turning my stomach. Perhaps you can go be a real estate agent in Shishmaref, or one of the other villages that we're having to relocate due to climate change. Hopefully at that point you might understand exactly what it is that is offensive about your comment.
The government does directly control the creation of money. They have delegated the extension of credit, which does "create" money, but somewhat differently. The way it works is that the government sets regulations and interest rates which directly affect how much money is created via credit in a given period, and when you want a loan, it can be from anyone that trusts you. Having to apply to the State for credit doesn't make sense, does it? What is it to them whether I am a good creditor, as long as my taxes are paid?
The "right answer" here is credit unions: nonprofit, non-governmental agencies to provide an easy source of credit. I'd even be down for some amount of subsidy for small loans. That these entities cannot compete as effectively with profit-driven entities is proving to be detrimental to society, as it encourages a truly spectacular concentration of wealth.
None of this has a lot to do with the money supply in the greater sense, and it's really not the issue. No one gives two shits about the money supply. The issue is wealth. The money game should not be able to be won by just one person all the time, and so we keep adding new rules and expanding the role of government. Half the laws on the books are about keeping people from making money by being an asshole. In this case though, (and speaking as more-or-less a socialist) the answer isn't actually that we need to absorb this function into the government. The local and international credit markets are just that, markets, and those markets serve a vast spectrum of needs, and probably most of those the government has no real business being involved in. We want instead to promote ethical entities (which may or may not be synonymous with nonprofit) in that market, and from time to time we will end up punishing extreme concentrations of wealth for being too successful.
Those who think there is something inherently wrong about that last bit should perhaps consider the moral qualities of the guillotine.
Which brings us back to the other point, which is that commercialization is not inherently evil.
You have a wonderful career in comedy ahead of you, but just in case someone else missed the joke, Microsoft accounts for a little over 0.1% ($3.1B) of what the IRS collects. If they didn't have a massive amount of tax shelters, they would get up to a whopping 0.2% ($5.5B) of tax revenues. This is not exactly small potatoes, but the idea that the IRS has some major financial stake in MS's profit margins is farcical. It's not like the IRS gets a cut of the take anyway; their budget is set by Congress for the most part. Lastly, if the IRS were really interested in increasing revenues, there's an estimated 6.8% of revenues ($166B) lying around in corporate tax shelters.
Waitasec. Open source companies don't pay taxes in your world? Forget what I said, sign me up for your newsletter!
bad review != advertisement. Especially for a product that isn't commercial. Parent poster is talking about them hoping to eventually make money off of the attention. If that's an advertisement, so is everything on slashdot.
Shut the fuck up.
What's your alternative? Hand rolling everything? God forbid that someone provide a useful, open-source utility and try to sell support services for it.
Yes, everything should be provided free of charge in all forms, relying only on donations, or just that good feeling of having provided something useful. No sarcasm, and yes, I have my money where my mouth is. I get paid for my time, not for the code I write, and I would consider it personally immoral to do otherwise. If you think that making money off of open source code is wrong, however, you have just put yourself in the category of "more of a zealot than RMS." In other words, you are so far off in looney land as to be utterly divorced from reality. You are so far gone that you're actually a counterexample to Poe's Law.
I can't construct a formal reductio ad absurdum to show that you're a backbiting assmonkey whose ideas hurt open source, but I will let the examples of Google, Red Hat, Canonical, Github, SourceForge, Intel, and the vast number of for-profit business entities that have made the Open Source movement a powerful force in the software market speak for themselves.
"... they may actually have contracts to prevent "poaching" of employees, so this trick should only be pulled with serous thought and legal review."
Such contracts are quite likely to be illegal, as evidenced by the Apple-Google-Pixar-et-all suit.
It's possible that non-compete agreements might an issue, but those are frequently unenforceable and, if some employee signs an employment contract containing one, it's prima facie evidence that they are too dumb to be worth hiring anyway. Failing to have a competent lawyer review your employment contract is also a bad move; it's unlikely that the lawyer will cost anywhere near as much as the contract is worth.
Can you tell I am a contractor? I really need to just write some angry contract-related blog posts and get it out of my system.
Okay, so maybe BasilBrush had a point after all...
(see sig)
I worked in game programming several years back, and 1TB was quite reasonable. Branching meant IT would bring everyone a new hard drive to store the new branch on.
Git just isn't designed for huge repos full of binary blobs.
Apparently neither is Perforce/SVN. More to the point, I am aware of no sound basis for that statement. Git does binary diffs just fine, and compresses the data when reasonable, and stores file deltas where that is more efficient. Cherry-picking a change to a binary file sounds painful, but it's likely that's a stupid idea that would not be tenable in any RCS. If there is some secret limitation to how git stores files, I'd love to hear about it. My suspicion is that this "svn is better for large repos" idea is being promoted by people who have either not used git at all, or do not understand how it works internally.
Imagine you wrote a song, filmed a short video or created this amazing illustration and 5 years later it was used by corporations to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. How would you feel about that?
Fucking fantastic.
I would never have to worry about finding work as an artist again. I might have to worry about working again but so it goes.
Ouch. No, I haven't got much into NL programming. I think those kind of comments are copy/pasted though. Mine was just congratulatory and vapid.
I have a very clear idea of what this book is about and what it covers, and in what level of detail. It does indeed seem like a good introduction to the subject. Thank you for writing this, and of course for your other reviews.
Minus an atmosphere, and assuming .3 albedo (based on satellite measurements), the Earth would be about -18 degrees C (255 K). The average surface temperature of the Earth is currently around 14.5 degrees C. The atmosphere traps enough heat energy to take the entire globe from deep freeze to balmy. Geothermal and tidal heating account for pretty negligible amounts of heating.
So, two points: one, the amount of energy involved is rather large, and a small percentage change is going to have a huge effect. Secondly, heating the atmosphere changes its content. The atmosphere is more or less saturated with water vapor, and any increase in temperatures increases the amount of water that it can contain. We can't do anything about how much water is on the planet, for reasons that should be obvious. On the other hand, we're really great at making CO2. A naive calculation would indicate that you can increase temperatures almost arbitrarily by adding CO2, in fact.
Oh hey look there's a textbook that has this same objection explained in detail. Apparently your objection was addressed in the 1950s. Whoops.
What's that? Facebook produces bad software? Say it ain't so.
This story should be titled, "Facebook's Mobile Team Continues to Suck". These guys were able to put together a half-decent Facebook app, for the noble purpose of demonstrating that Zuckerberg is completely ignorant of technology.
Install scripts, mostly dev stuff. Apache, mysql, postgres. There's a nice default gui. If there is another debian + openbox + web dev install scripts distro that I am unaware of, or if you've got your own custom debian image, then maybe this isn't that useful.
Probably if dpkg works for you, you aren't their target audience.
How quickly you accelerate is almost certainly going to be the biggest factor in fuel efficiency. There are optimizations beyond that, though, as you point out. I adjusted the way I drive after reading this article about hypermilers.
If you drive carefully, you can get mileage that exceeds EPA estimates. If you don't drive carefully, you're probably not saving a lot of travel time, and your mileage is pretty much going to be terrible. You don't need to be Speed Racer every time you sit behind a wheel. Eventually market forces will limit that ability to the privileged class anyway, but until then you're pretty much a douche for speeding.
The test should be redesigned, but you all are missing the consequences. You only have so much power in your gas tank, and F = ma means that you really only have a couple good options for improving MPG. There's a limit to how much you can reduce the mass, so manufacturers will start limiting the rate that you can accelerate at. If you have driven a Prius, you know what I am talking about.
Personally, I'm not in a hurry, and I figure time spent accelerating is probably going to be a small component of total travel time. The rest of you should be aware of what you're asking for.
Such an approach could be advantageous to ambitious workers who may work on two or three projects simultaneously, presuming, of course, no conflict of interest.
Unless the company in question is a consultancy itself, there should not be a conflict of interest. Nor is there any justification for restrictive covenants. To my mind, that is nothing more than a power play, and as a contractor I am in an equal bargaining position.
You seemingly don't understand the purpose of employees vs contractors. You get to spread a number of costs out among your employees. Contract negotiation is a pain in the butt, among other things. Also, when I am setting my rates, I pass on any expenses due to down time, or employee training, or materials, directly on to the customer, with markup. There's no free lunch.
Finally, while it is theoretically possible to schedule your time to be able to take on multiple contracts at once, there is a lot of overhead in task-switching. You're not an employee any more, you're a business entity, so that means that you also need to be HR, an accountant, a lawyer, and a salesman, or employ people to do these things for you. It is possible to wear all of those hats and juggle three or more contracts, but it is far from easy.
Lies.
If it's a product, then I own it after I have paid for it, and can do with it as I please.
If you are instead insisting on ownership of the *idea* and not a specific representation thereof, as copyright does, then this is an artificial, novel, and harmful construction.
I might add, you have no idea what socialism is, and the 'free market' types generally don't like government-enforced monopolies.
"Lingua Franca"
No need to bring up Aramaic when we have a perfectly good term for the concept.
Right, because there's some sort of profit motive here that we should be serving. Some guy's business is going to get ahold of this and that will make all of us (shareholders) rich, rich, rich!
Let's point out that there are slightly bigger barriers to entry in the space exploration market than in the internet market. And if there's one thing in the world that isn't going to get smaller and more efficient with time, it's a gravity well. At least until we develop a space elevator. So the market is guaranteed to be in control of a few large players -- most likely only one -- and make most of its money off of government agents. The cynical part of me suggests that this is exactly the role that Musk wants to inhabit.
For any industry, the amount of competition is directly proportional to the cost to enter the market. Space exploration is at about the level where billionaires and people with the net worth of a small country can play around with it. More or less on the public dime. So, just like the internet.
I'll skip the discussion of what exactly there is in space to make money off of. Without the possibility of competition, a large profit potential would just make things worse.
It's not because we want it to be difficult. It's that we want it to be useful. If you keep on bumping up your feature count, you will eventually get to a point where what you have done is create a bad programming language (all programming languages are bad programming languages, but it goes double for GUI-based ones).
Programming is more or less the ultimate tool for telling a computer what to do. It is also more or less directly opposed to simplicity. Linux is optimized for utility. You can use it to create a simple interface to the computer, at which point we generally stop calling it Linux, but you cannot simultaneously optimize in two opposite directions. You cannot build a computer appliance using the tools contained within that appliance.
Designing interfaces is all about managing complexity. Most linux distributions opt for more complexity/utility rather than less. There is some complexity for complexity's sake, and some complexity for historical reasons, but utility is the driving force. And Linux users will get very upset at anything that detracts from that utility, as seen in (among other flamewars) the Wayland vs X11 debates.
In the morning, I love the smell of loving the smell of loving the smell of recursion.
I think to be recursive, your verbs need to refer to themselves. You know? I know that you know. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know what I'm talking about.
I am loving that I am loving that I am loving the smell of recursion in the sentence.
Okay, I think I'm done for now.
Do you think that I'm done?
When working with designs meant for screen printing, the original artwork was done in RGB, then a team would separate the color channels (in Photoshop), one channel per ink to be used. They could technically do CMYK directly, but it didn't look good for a wide variety of purposes -- you can imagine a flat-filled cartoon character would be pretty much impossible. It would look a bit like comic book halftoning, probably. The shop would use that when they wanted to print Thomas Kincaide-esque sweatshirts for grannies. They would also use additional channels for things that weren't colors, like adhesive (for foil, usually) and clear inks.
I don't imagine that having more than three or four color channels is a new thing, or difficult to deal with. I would imagine even the prosumer technology would allow you to choose between various rendering intents. Probably the color separation is handled at the driver or device level, but TIFF, PDF, and DCS 2.0 (??) should handle extra channels natively.
A few more details on screen printing for those who might care: The actual screen printing process was not computer-controlled as a rule. The smaller shops I worked at printed a transparency which was transferred onto the screen by a photographic process, but the large one had a computer-controlled airjet "printer" that would knock out the design. Usually they would do a few samples by hand, to work out what ink and screen combination to use (different mesh sizes and ink thicknesses produce slightly different effects), and adjust finer details like when you would "flash" the shirt. That is, hitting it with a very high powered xenon lamp for a few seconds to dry the ink, before applying a new layer. You could do some interesting painterly effects with wet-on-wet ink; you can also make a hell of a mess that way. Flashing also tends to affect the color somewhat, especially for temperature-sensitive inks. After you get a few good samples, you send them off to the client as a proof. Then you would set up your automatic press for a run of a couple hundred. Color balance was something that the press operator kept an eye on after that point. After printing, the shirts are sent through a 400 degree open oven on a conveyor belt, for perhaps 10-20 seconds, to cure the ink.
Very fun job, the ink is messy as hell. I would still be doing it, but working with computers pays better.
There comes a point where there is no readily identifiable "best" strategy. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in either direction. Perhaps one persons says, "the rule of thumb that holds for the common case, doesn't apply here." Perhaps there are valid differences about what goal to optimize for -- it is a law of the universe that you can't optimize in all directions at once.
At some point the only way to decide the issue one way is to fork the code and see what becomes popular. As an outsider, you don't really have a good perspective on whether this is justifiable. Clearly the magic code factory has stopped for the moment, but coding efforts are probably stalled more often than not. I started on a new project a few weeks ago, and I don't expect to be doing anything but refactoring and bug fixes for several weeks to come. And if I decided that it was just as much trouble to start over with a bare set of classes and do things the way I think they should have been done the first time, are you going to call me out on it? Is there any better proof of the viability of that strategy but in the execution? Perhaps this will be a better performing or more feature-ful product, and perhaps not, but if the only thing learned from the experience is that "doing it this way turned out to be a bad idea," that still counts as a win in my book.
A failure is something you don't learn anything from.
Lastly, as counterproductive as a fork may be, it's nowhere near as hard to merge changes as it would be if the guy had just started a whole new project. Which is the biggest reason to cry foul over Canonical's development efforts.