Ops Request 17802-0 was completed at 173/21:11:12, successfully transitioning ACS from Suspend to its Operate1 state. In this state, ACS normal engineering data collection can be observed."
The ACS suspended at 170/17:15:25z. An Ops Briefing was held at 6 pm on June 19,2006.
At 170/17:15:25 the ACS 715 and ACS 707 status buffer (STB) messages were received indicating the ACS WFC CEB analog signal processing +15 and + 5 volt power supply voltages were out of limits high which resulted in the ACS suspend. Detailed analysis of the event is underway with a tiger team meeting planned for Tuesday. "
Umm, if it becomes less dense, it expands... Another way to explain it: It would need a higher column of lower-density water to counter the pressure from the higher-density water...
Unless it means that any taxpayer Oregon who becomes a victim of identity theft can now file and actually receive a large claim at the institution that leaked their data, it's still severely lacking...
I think there should be a law that attaches liability to owners of such information. If holding that information and letting it out can result in you paying steep damages, then companies and governments will think twice about a having such a bad security policy like that place has... Or at least they will buy insurance and the victims don't get screwed like they do now.
Ok: 99.886% is three nines, but it is not four. 99.886->99.9->99.89./me ducks
Rounding is not a privilege you can just apply at will. If you've studied engineering or physics (chemistry?) you know you that the amount of rounding you have to apply is precisely dictated by the precision of your input values and the calculations done on those numbers. Either rounding too much or too adds unnecessary inaccuracy.
If you've had 10 hours of downtime, you'd know it sufficiently exact to have less than 0.5 hour error, but let's assume 9.5...10.5 hours -> 99.880%...99.892. Less than three nines even in the extremes of your measurement error.
You need less than 8.8 hours downtime to get three nines, which is quite a chunk less downtime than 10 hours (12% less, duh)...
If you have to get there by rounding, you're cheating if you ask me. If you know it's 99.886%, then you know it's less than 99.900%, so you know it's not three nines.
Anybody who knows they are/have been down 10 hours in a year know they didn't get to 99.900%, so if they round it and call it three nines, they are lying.
"When it comes down to it, the BSD's are forked based on design philosophies."
Sorry dude, penis referrals are not going to hide that that statement is in conflict with the webpage saying that BSD is well designed and than Linux is prodded/poked/etc. So, BSD is better designed than Linux, and that is why it needs all those 'design philisophy'-based forks and Linux doesn't? Riiiight.
"He's not just referring to the kernel. A BSD system is much more than the kernel. He's referring to a linux distro, which is the kernel plus a bunch of stuff that is shoehorned, prodded, and poked in."
Oh, so the web pages are not about the kernels but about the userspace, eh? Well then, BSD userspace programs are Unix pedigree, how? The C-compiler in BSD, 'gcc' is made by Unix hackers, and the C-compiler in Linux, 'gcc' is make by PC hackers. Right, ok. And how is, for example KDE on a BSD less prodded at than on a Linux Distro? No need to answer, I already know the answers to all of it.
'He responds to exactly this critique of his writing on the "responses" page. You'll see that he did not mean it pejoratively.'
No he doesn't, because the 'tweak poke prod' sentence does not accurately represent the serious architectural design and engineering development work done by the Linux kernel developers. If you know anything about how Linux's internals get to be, you will know that it cannot be described by 'tweak poke prod' anymore than any other core kernel development. And it is ignorant and condescending for BSD fans to describe it like that.
Maybe he 'did not mean in pejoratively', but that's how it is when you say things in that manner. He chose to use those words and not to change them when they were 'misunderstood'. Maybe BSD is 'meant to be' 'the best' too. OS kernels are not something where 'its the thought that counts' matters. It's what it is and what it does that matters.
You know, it's the 'BSD attitude' that keeps a lot of people away. Elitism usually results in not being open for outside influence. A.K.A. suggestions for improvement.
Ah, whatever. It doesn't hurt me, it only hurts themselves, and if they don't care, then nobody does. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss feels good.
NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?
If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.
"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."
Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.
But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.
And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)
NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.
"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"
I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.
It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.
BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.
Maybe this post is flamebait itself, but the page linked in the PP definitely is, so I guess this is response to a flamebait...
<rant>
That guy is just another BSD evangelist. The short summary of his long story is "BSD is from a better breed created by superior software designers". I quote, he says Linux is "beat up, punched around, tweaked, poked, prodded, manged, digested, spit out, stomped on, chewed up, tossed out, brought in, and otherwise manipulated", and in the description of what BSD is, it comes down to "BSD is pedigree". Baseless Elitist Crap(tm), that's what it is. It's the 'we are better because we are' in long format as is commonly seen in BSD evangelists. Total 11 Pages of Blah Blah Blah
I'll touch on a couple of things from his first page here:
He says SCO owns the Unix code, which is wrong. The Open Group's website says SCO bought it from Novell and this guy is happy to repeat that, but Novell itself says it didn't transfer nor sell the copyright of its Unix code to SCO. Novell sold the UnixWare business to SCO, not the copyrights (==ownership) of the code. From http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html : "On 28 May 2003 Novell stated[40] that SCO owns neither the patents nor the copyrights to the Unix source code." See also http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110904,0 0.asp
He repeats a mantra that says "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.". Note the consistent 'PC' as the target for the OS... With Linux supporting many more non-PC platforms than the BSD's, that statement is too wrong in its core to even begin talk about the details.
What I don't get is how the BSD people keep feeling so superior when there is so much that Linux has and can do that BSD doesn't have or can't do. All the while they often claim to know Linux better than Linux people know BSD. I guess they simply enjoy bathing in their ignorance.
The problems is that it's uncertain that every mention of 'millisecond' was meant to be 'microsecond'.
For example, I can agree with "When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance,'"
But s/milliseconds/microseconds in that, and you're talking about a significantly reduced number of applications that need that kind of response times.
Microseconds are short for most processes. For example, Linux task-switches 100, 250 or 1000 times, depending on the processor. That means the timeslices are 1us, 4us, or 10us. Applications already sit still, not doing anything for multiples of the timeslices, so latency in the same order of magnitude often won't be noticed much if at all.
"Just completely skip the quantization step (or, equivalently, use a quantization matrix of ones) and you've got lossless."
Not exactly. It's close, but it's not lossless. The reason for this is that the DCT is not fully reversible, and even if it were, the JPEG standard does not have a precision standard for the DCT/IDCT in encoders/decoders (not even IEEE-1180 like MPEG1/MPEG2), which means that there can be quite large differences between different encoders/decoders.
"If you put it out for free, and warn it's unsupported, that's fine, but don't expect anyone to care or use it. If you offer lousy support because "hey I'm doing this for free in my spare time" then you're just making yourself look bad."
Guess what: First: All OSS licenses clearly indicate that there is no warranty whatsoever. Second: OSS is not developed to make the developers good for you.
The kernel developers give extremely lousy support for users like you. Why? Because they can be more productive developing. Kernel support for non-developer users is given by commercial companies such as RedHat, IBM and Novell, and by expert users. Find a project with bad support? It probably has too little, or too lazy expert users. It's not the developers that are the problem.
The biggest problem with OSS projects is that in closed-source projects, nonproductive team members that just complain either change and get productive, or... well, they get 'downsized'. In OSS the whiny luser just keep coming back for more.
"And they certainly don't want someone to offer advice on how real people think."
Now you're saying that developers are not real people...
"Personally, I think all three of those things ARE productive things to do for a project."
Then you do it or pay somebody to do it.
"Attitudes like the one your display are what give open source developers as a whole a bad name, and most of them aren't like that. Just the overly vocal ones, unfortunately."
Attitudes like the one you display have caused very good and productive OSS developers to quit.
They want people to look at and use their work. If they didn't, they wouldn't put it out there and say "Look at me. Look at me. Use this!"
You don't understand OSS developers. I guess that's why you find yourself in situations like this...
No OSS developer is waiting for a complaining, non-productive user. OSS is put out to share with other deverloper-users with the goal of giving other developer-users the opportunity to take it further if they want.
An OSS project does not need non-contributing users. At all.
The developers have no responsibility to you or your boss, unless you or your boss pays them.
Want to change that? Become helpful. Whining doesn't help.
"It's not supposed to create thousands of crappy, unsupported scripts-- that doesn't help anybody."
Yes it is. And it's your opinion that those scripts are crappy. Many others will disagree, and nothing is stopping you from not using the 'crappy' stuff.
If all you do is complain, you're not helping OSS. I'll refer you to the more eloquent description of the issue below:
Dude, you're the one with the problem. It's OSS made by volunteers. Translation: It's up to you to fix the 'problem'.
Getting pissed at volunteers will get you nowhere.
Re:Oh .. I get it.
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"If you don't care about it, then don't release it to the public."
You know what? If you don't like the response of a developer when you ask him a favor, then simply quit using the software. You have that freedom, same as the freedom for OSS developers to even do things such as 'release and forget'. For you: the same end-result, and for the rest of us, it means a plethora of software will still be available.
Re:Oh .. I get it.
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1, Informative
"Yeah, but if you don't care about creating a product people will use... why bother? The entire point of software is for people to use it..."
One of the main things you're missing about OSS is that OSS is not created for users like you. OSS it created by the developers to 'scratch their itch': The primary targeted user is the developer him/herself.
Then, the OSS is released as Open Source to attract other developer/users to help the project along. The non-developing users are along for the ride, and are more than welcome to join the fun. However, that does not give them any rights other than what the OSS license gives to users. None of the OSS licenses give users any right to bitch about the developers. The GPL is very clear on that issue in this quote: "we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software."
"Multiple bug reports for the same bug are a good indication that the bug should be moved up on your priority list because a lot of people are having that problem."
The main misunderstanding between OSS developers and users like you is that the OSS developers are not delivering a service to you. They are developig something and sharing it with you and everybody else. If you want service, you need a contract. If you want a contract, you need money.
A million people could be having a particular problem with a particular piece of OSS software (don't like the position of the 'ok' button), and the developers could still choose to completely ignore the issue, because they prefer to do something else 'make it interface better with the new digital camcorder they got for their birthday'.
The situation changes when those million people each plegde a dime to have it 'fixed' for them, that will quickly change the priority list of the developer.
Otherwise, stop whining and stop distracting the developers. They are volunteers, and if you disagree with what they do, you need to keep it to yourself, or do it better yourself, or get a contract with the developers...
There is nothing you can simply demand from OSS developers.
"Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki"
I have seen many. Maybe your problem is more located in inability to _find_ the documentation.
"Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)"
Linux is usually downloaded... If you can download Linux you can browse around in a wiki. If you buy Linux on a CD, then it's up to RedHat/Novell/Whoever sold you that CD to help you, not the OSS developers.
"it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot."
It would get _YOU_ better results, not the developers. That half-hour developer time is better spent developing. Even in closed-source projects, developers are notoriously bad at documentaton. That's just how it is. The solution is not for users to whine about that, the solution is for the whiners to pick up the shovel and help the digging.
You want the OSS developers to do things for you that they don't do right now? They are volunteers and have the full right to do as they please. Or: How much are you paying for their service?
Slashdot Mirror
Posted this Friday:
r owse_frm/thread/402c960a631ad339
"SIGNIFICANT EVENTS:
ACS Transition to Operate1
Ops Request 17802-0 was completed at 173/21:11:12, successfully
transitioning ACS from Suspend to its Operate1 state. In this state,
ACS normal engineering data collection can be observed."
From:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.astro.hubble/b
After this message on June 20:
"SIGNIFICANT EVENTS:
The ACS suspended at 170/17:15:25z. An Ops Briefing was held at 6 pm
on June 19,2006.
At 170/17:15:25 the ACS 715 and ACS 707 status buffer (STB) messages
were received indicating the ACS WFC CEB analog signal processing +15
and + 5 volt power supply voltages were out of limits high which
resulted in the ACS suspend. Detailed analysis of the event is
underway with a tiger team meeting planned for Tuesday. "
"*1 Of course they can decide to reduce measure precision for some unveiled unethical reason but that's quite a different matter."
;-)
That's really what I meant. I expect a vendor claiming X nines not to get there by rounding but by actually getting that exact uptime or better.
But then again, I have been known to have unrealistic expectations before
Maybe I should just demand a nine more than I know I will need...
"it should become less dense, and shrink."
Umm, if it becomes less dense, it expands... Another way to explain it: It would need a higher column of lower-density water to counter the pressure from the higher-density water...
Unless it means that any taxpayer Oregon who becomes a victim of identity theft can now file and actually receive a large claim at the institution that leaked their data, it's still severely lacking...
Just imho of course...
I think there should be a law that attaches liability to owners of such information. If holding that information and letting it out can result in you paying steep damages, then companies and governments will think twice about a having such a bad security policy like that place has... Or at least they will buy insurance and the victims don't get screwed like they do now.
Ok: 99.886% is three nines, but it is not four. /me ducks
t icle=articles%2Fp2633%2F06cp33%2F06cp33.asp&guid=& searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True
99.886->99.9->99.89.
Rounding is not a privilege you can just apply at will. If you've studied engineering or physics (chemistry?) you know you that the amount of rounding you have to apply is precisely dictated by the precision of your input values and the calculations done on those numbers. Either rounding too much or too adds unnecessary inaccuracy.
If you've had 10 hours of downtime, you'd know it sufficiently exact to have less than 0.5 hour error, but let's assume 9.5...10.5 hours -> 99.880%...99.892. Less than three nines even in the extremes of your measurement error.
You need less than 8.8 hours downtime to get three nines, which is quite a chunk less downtime than 10 hours (12% less, duh)...
See also here http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?ar
If you have to get there by rounding, you're cheating if you ask me. If you know it's 99.886%, then you know it's less than 99.900%, so you know it's not three nines.
Anybody who knows they are/have been down 10 hours in a year know they didn't get to 99.900%, so if they round it and call it three nines, they are lying.
is for people who have bought into the whole "10 hours is 99.999% availability, which is excellent" midnset.
You mean for people who can't calculate.
While five nines is pretty good, 10 hours is not:
365*24*60*(1-0.99999) ~= 5.26 minutes of downtime.
Ten hours down is really bad:
1-10/(365*24)~= 0.99886 = 99.886%
"When it comes down to it, the BSD's are forked based on design philosophies."
Sorry dude, penis referrals are not going to hide that that statement is in conflict with the webpage saying that BSD is well designed and than Linux is prodded/poked/etc. So, BSD is better designed than Linux, and that is why it needs all those 'design philisophy'-based forks and Linux doesn't? Riiiight.
"He's not just referring to the kernel. A BSD system is much more than the kernel. He's referring to a linux distro, which is the kernel plus a bunch of stuff that is shoehorned, prodded, and poked in."
Oh, so the web pages are not about the kernels but about the userspace, eh? Well then, BSD userspace programs are Unix pedigree, how? The C-compiler in BSD, 'gcc' is made by Unix hackers, and the C-compiler in Linux, 'gcc' is make by PC hackers. Right, ok. And how is, for example KDE on a BSD less prodded at than on a Linux Distro? No need to answer, I already know the answers to all of it.
'He responds to exactly this critique of his writing on the "responses" page. You'll see that he did not mean it pejoratively.'
No he doesn't, because the 'tweak poke prod' sentence does not accurately represent the serious architectural design and engineering development work done by the Linux kernel developers. If you know anything about how Linux's internals get to be, you will know that it cannot be described by 'tweak poke prod' anymore than any other core kernel development. And it is ignorant and condescending for BSD fans to describe it like that.
Maybe he 'did not mean in pejoratively', but that's how it is when you say things in that manner. He chose to use those words and not to change them when they were 'misunderstood'. Maybe BSD is 'meant to be' 'the best' too. OS kernels are not something where 'its the thought that counts' matters. It's what it is and what it does that matters.
You know, it's the 'BSD attitude' that keeps a lot of people away. Elitism usually results in not being open for outside influence. A.K.A. suggestions for improvement.
Ah, whatever. It doesn't hurt me, it only hurts themselves, and if they don't care, then nobody does. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss feels good.
"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "
x InSpace.html
t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)
NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?
If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.
"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."
Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.
But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.
http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linu
And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_
NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.
"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"
I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.
It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.
BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm
Maybe this post is flamebait itself, but the page linked in the PP definitely is, so I guess this is response to a flamebait...
0 0.asp
<rant>
That guy is just another BSD evangelist. The short summary of his long story is "BSD is from a better breed created by superior software designers". I quote, he says Linux is "beat up, punched around, tweaked, poked, prodded, manged, digested, spit out, stomped on, chewed up, tossed out, brought in, and otherwise manipulated", and in the description of what BSD is, it comes down to "BSD is pedigree". Baseless Elitist Crap(tm), that's what it is. It's the 'we are better because we are' in long format as is commonly seen in BSD evangelists. Total 11 Pages of Blah Blah Blah
I'll touch on a couple of things from his first page here:
He says SCO owns the Unix code, which is wrong. The Open Group's website says SCO bought it from Novell and this guy is happy to repeat that, but Novell itself says it didn't transfer nor sell the copyright of its Unix code to SCO. Novell sold the UnixWare business to SCO, not the copyrights (==ownership) of the code. From http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html : "On 28 May 2003 Novell stated[40] that SCO owns neither the patents nor the copyrights to the Unix source code." See also http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110904,
He repeats a mantra that says "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.". Note the consistent 'PC' as the target for the OS... With Linux supporting many more non-PC platforms than the BSD's, that statement is too wrong in its core to even begin talk about the details.
What I don't get is how the BSD people keep feeling so superior when there is so much that Linux has and can do that BSD doesn't have or can't do. All the while they often claim to know Linux better than Linux people know BSD. I guess they simply enjoy bathing in their ignorance.
</rant>
Oh no! Now I'm doing it too ;-) It's contagious!
The problems is that it's uncertain that every mention of 'millisecond' was meant to be 'microsecond'.
For example, I can agree with "When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance,'"
But s/milliseconds/microseconds in that, and you're talking about a significantly reduced number of applications that need that kind of response times.
Microseconds are short for most processes. For example, Linux task-switches 100, 250 or 1000 times, depending on the processor. That means the timeslices are 1us, 4us, or 10us. Applications already sit still, not doing anything for multiples of the timeslices, so latency in the same order of magnitude often won't be noticed much if at all.
"Just completely skip the quantization step (or, equivalently, use a quantization matrix of ones) and you've got lossless."
Not exactly. It's close, but it's not lossless. The reason for this is that the DCT is not fully reversible, and even if it were, the JPEG standard does not have a precision standard for the DCT/IDCT in encoders/decoders (not even IEEE-1180 like MPEG1/MPEG2), which means that there can be quite large differences between different encoders/decoders.
And JPEG-LS doesn't even use the DCT...
http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg/jpegls.html
Like I said. Keeps coming back for more.
"If you put it out for free, and warn it's unsupported, that's fine, but don't expect anyone to care or use it. If you offer lousy support because "hey I'm doing this for free in my spare time" then you're just making yourself look bad."
Guess what: First: All OSS licenses clearly indicate that there is no warranty whatsoever. Second: OSS is not developed to make the developers good for you.
The kernel developers give extremely lousy support for users like you. Why? Because they can be more productive developing. Kernel support for non-developer users is given by commercial companies such as RedHat, IBM and Novell, and by expert users. Find a project with bad support? It probably has too little, or too lazy expert users. It's not the developers that are the problem.
The biggest problem with OSS projects is that in closed-source projects, nonproductive team members that just complain either change and get productive, or... well, they get 'downsized'. In OSS the whiny luser just keep coming back for more.
"And they certainly don't want someone to offer advice on how real people think."
6 266&cid=15373042
Now you're saying that developers are not real people...
"Personally, I think all three of those things ARE productive things to do for a project."
Then you do it or pay somebody to do it.
"Attitudes like the one your display are what give open source developers as a whole a bad name, and most of them aren't like that. Just the overly vocal ones, unfortunately."
Attitudes like the one you display have caused very good and productive OSS developers to quit.
Thanks but no thank from everybody else.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18
They want people to look at and use their work. If they didn't, they wouldn't put it out there and say "Look at me. Look at me. Use this!"
6 266&cid=15373042
You don't understand OSS developers. I guess that's why you find yourself in situations like this...
No OSS developer is waiting for a complaining, non-productive user. OSS is put out to share with other deverloper-users with the goal of giving other developer-users the opportunity to take it further if they want.
An OSS project does not need non-contributing users. At all.
swillden puts it more eloquently here: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18
The developers have no responsibility to you or your boss, unless you or your boss pays them.
6 266&cid=15373042
Want to change that? Become helpful. Whining doesn't help.
"It's not supposed to create thousands of crappy, unsupported scripts-- that doesn't help anybody."
Yes it is. And it's your opinion that those scripts are crappy. Many others will disagree, and nothing is stopping you from not using the 'crappy' stuff.
If all you do is complain, you're not helping OSS. I'll refer you to the more eloquent description of the issue below:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18
Dude, you're the one with the problem. It's OSS made by volunteers. Translation: It's up to you to fix the 'problem'.
Getting pissed at volunteers will get you nowhere.
"If you don't care about it, then don't release it to the public."
You know what? If you don't like the response of a developer when you ask him a favor, then simply quit using the software. You have that freedom, same as the freedom for OSS developers to even do things such as 'release and forget'. For you: the same end-result, and for the rest of us, it means a plethora of software will still be available.
"Yeah, but if you don't care about creating a product people will use... why bother? The entire point of software is for people to use it..."
One of the main things you're missing about OSS is that OSS is not created for users like you. OSS it created by the developers to 'scratch their itch': The primary targeted user is the developer him/herself.
Then, the OSS is released as Open Source to attract other developer/users to help the project along. The non-developing users are along for the ride, and are more than welcome to join the fun. However, that does not give them any rights other than what the OSS license gives to users. None of the OSS licenses give users any right to bitch about the developers. The GPL is very clear on that issue in this quote: "we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software."
"Multiple bug reports for the same bug are a good indication that the bug should be moved up on your priority list because a lot of people are having that problem."
The main misunderstanding between OSS developers and users like you is that the OSS developers are not delivering a service to you. They are developig something and sharing it with you and everybody else. If you want service, you need a contract. If you want a contract, you need money.
A million people could be having a particular problem with a particular piece of OSS software (don't like the position of the 'ok' button), and the developers could still choose to completely ignore the issue, because they prefer to do something else 'make it interface better with the new digital camcorder they got for their birthday'.
The situation changes when those million people each plegde a dime to have it 'fixed' for them, that will quickly change the priority list of the developer.
Otherwise, stop whining and stop distracting the developers. They are volunteers, and if you disagree with what they do, you need to keep it to yourself, or do it better yourself, or get a contract with the developers...
There is nothing you can simply demand from OSS developers.
"Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki"
I have seen many. Maybe your problem is more located in inability to _find_ the documentation.
"Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)"
Linux is usually downloaded... If you can download Linux you can browse around in a wiki. If you buy Linux on a CD, then it's up to RedHat/Novell/Whoever sold you that CD to help you, not the OSS developers.
"it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot."
It would get _YOU_ better results, not the developers. That half-hour developer time is better spent developing. Even in closed-source projects, developers are notoriously bad at documentaton. That's just how it is. The solution is not for users to whine about that, the solution is for the whiners to pick up the shovel and help the digging.
You want the OSS developers to do things for you that they don't do right now? They are volunteers and have the full right to do as they please. Or: How much are you paying for their service?