I'm sure that you're right, but perhaps you're ignoring one fact. Projects has an optimum number of contributors. Getting more than the optimum number is an actual hindrance to success. What that optimum number is varies with the project and with the management system. Sometimes the important thing is do get reasonable decisions made quickly. Sometimes it's important to smooth over people's feelings.
Linux has done well enough that I suspect that Linus has made nearly optimal choices given the available resources including his available time and energy, but also including the organizational structure, the management tools (both code and personnel), etc. I do feel that he might do a bit better if he had to make a few fewer personal decisions, but then some people would feel snubbed. I know that frequently things have gone back and forth several times before Linus acted in such a way as to close off debate (temporarily).
Guido manages. I'm not sure about Larry Wall, but I suspect so. Walter Bright manages.
Different people have different management styles. Linus' style *is* rather abrasive at times, but he gets the job done. (As do Guido and Walter Bright. Perl, however, seems to have stagnated.)
P.S.: I'm not a user of Perl, so someone more familiar with the community may well correct my opinions as an outside observer.
It's not an arbitrary point of "divergence", it's a retrospective one. You can't know that these two individuals who are siblings are members of a different species until considerably later you observe that their descendants can no longer interbreed (or never choose to do so). Picking those two individuals as the fork isn't arbitrary, but it's also impossible to do at the time, you can only do it by looking at their descendants.
It's not so much the generation time, as that rodents generally have a faster mutation rate than primates. Generation time is also significant, though as it allows less-viable variations to be more quickly weeded out.
I would like to see *some* evidence that "directed evolution" occurs without human intervention. Mind you, we don't usually try to create new species. At one time we couldn't, these days we occasionally do. (For an exception, Corn [Maize] is a different species from Teotsine, but I'm not sure you could say people created it rather than merely preserved it.)
Various 3rd parties bought both of them. The media have been purchased by non-media companies over the last 5 decades. Prior to that they were mainly small, and most of them were always on the edge of failure, so it wasn't that expensive. (Actually, the three major media networks of the time, NBC, CBS, and ABC were already controlled by people whose interest was not in the news, except in a minor way. But at that time most cities had two daily newspapers, one of which was still independent. And most radio stations were independent.)
My suspicion is that the network coverage of the Vietnam War caused those interested in power to notice that this was a way of pushing their views effectively. I'm sure they already knew it, since Hearst created the Spanish-American war, but people know lots of things they don't pay attention to. Still, the only evidence I have for the link is some suspicious timing.
And no president has been elected in the last century without the support of the major players. The last relatively independent one was FDR, Teddy Rooseveldt tried to break away and failed. Chester A. Arthur was elected with the support of one of the major players, but then reneged. (Once a president gets into office, he becomes partially immune to the players, and occasionally breaks free. Getting re-elected requires not only popular support, but regaining support of a major player. [See Teddy Rooseveldt, Bull-Moose Party.])
There were lots of records that were either destroyed, or conveyed at low price to parties hiding behind "cutouts" (possibly an incorrect usage). It's true these were company records, but they also included things of interest to, e.g., IBM, and which IBM would have paid more for than did the actual recipient. (I'd need to check over the names, but I believe that there were some that Novel would have greatly desire to see, also.)
Well, making it directional can be a problem. So can loss of containment. So it all depends...and it depends on things that we don't know.
One problem predicted for most designs of fusion reactor is that the materials used to build it become damaged by radiation until they are too fragile to work. This can take years, but when it does happen the entire core is high level radioactive waste. (That should be recycleable as a source of low grade heat, but you need the infrastructure in place to handle it. And as it decays the amount of heat produced naturally decays also. But it remains dangerous for quite awhile. Still, you'd think that a heat exchanger could safely extract the heat.)
Too much is unknown about this project to derive ANY conclusions. Some people are more cynical than others, but it's not as if there haven't been many reasons recently to inspire cynicism.
If you've ever followed a bankruptcy, it must have been a very gentele one. I followed the SCO bankruptcy, which I hope was an exceptionally corrupt one, but I've no real basis for that hope. But I can gauarntee that you can't depend on anything being preserved.
Actually, I can see real advantages to "the cloud". I just don't see them making up for the vulnerabilities it creates. So if you have thorough backups, and sufficient connections that you could replace the cloud vendor in a day it it disappeared without warning, and sufficient protections that no leak or critical data can happen, then it sounds like a decent choice. But that's a lot of caveats, and few users seem to note them.
In a way it's sort of like outsourcing your IT department. You can't depend on the results as well, and if there are problems, you can't easily fix them. But the promise is that it will save you money. Sometimes it does, at least for awhile. Then the competent people are replaced with jerks, and you can't fix the problem, and you're tied into the contract.
Correction: PARTS of the Federal Government will be able to get it's data regardless of what happens. But they won't admit it or share it even with other parts of the Federal Government.
The Federal Government is not monolithic. Many parts of it are even trying to do the best job they can. Unfortunately, the parts that are powerful are the parts that scheme at being more powerful.
Oil is visible, and there are currently regulations mandating that they clean up spills. Once there weren't, and in those times they didn't cleam them up, and the spills were a lot larger.
Note that companies have a strong financial interest not to leak methane: every 1% they leak is profit they are throwing away; you don't think big evil greedy capitalist corporations are going to throw away money like that?
You can trace down the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, too. I'm not sure about the one about him throwing a half dollar over the Potomac.
IIRC from my school years, when the Spaniards landed in the new world, the Indians already had dogs, but not horses. If this is correct, as I assume, at least one of your assertions is factually inaccurate, unless you push "native dogs" back 10,000 years or more. It would be almost like saying Australia had no native dogs. Sort of a weird use of the language, even if defensible if you specify what you mean.
The measurements have shown that there are very significant, but unquantified, methane leaks. And the people doing the measurements were being paid by those who benefit from minimizing the significance of the leaks. One can't know what this means, but not being suspicious strikes me as naive.
OTOH, it's also unreasonable to believe that they are extremely dangerous. There no real evidence of that either. (Perhaps those earthquakes would have happened anyway, and anyway they were minor.) But there is significan evidence that the sides of the drilling are not being properly maintained against gas leaks. Also there is significant leakage around the drilling site. (This has always happened at oil wells, but when you're drilling for oil, the evidence is pretty clear, and the stuff can be collected and refined...though that's not a very profitable activity, so it won't happen without oversight.)
Fracking has also been responsible for a very large number of methane leaks. So many that it's reasonable to believe that there has actually been an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions, just a decline in measured ones. Which isn't the same thing.
OTOH, because the leaks haven't been accurately measured (Could they be?), you can't really say that there hasn't been a decline in greenhouse emissions. And both the companies and the politicians want to claim credit for a reduction. So there's little incentive to even try to get a good measurement, as long as you can just pretend that it doesn't matter.
A definite point. If you want to run Gnome3, you should probably strongly consider Fedora, or even Red Hat. They generally design the software they create to run well with their system. And they used to be pretty good about pushing out patches to bugs quickly.
OTOH, Fedora *is* the testing, or possibly the unstable, branch of Red Hat. If you don't want an unstable system, it may not be a good choice. (I'm pretty sure it's gotten better to use since it was re-branded from raw-hide, but I've used it so rarely [due to lilo vs. grub] that I'm not totally sure.)
The problem isn't the windows manager, it's systemd. I already run KDE, and sometimes xfce. I don't use Gnome3. But I also don't like to fight city hall. If the distro is seriously pushing systemd, then I'll use something else. But I also don't like deciding important things quickly. Right now that means avoiding anything that puts in a systemd dependency. And *that* means avoiding Gnome3...and everything that has it as a dependency.
A committe of developers that didn't have the authority intentionally miscalssified a decision and then rammed it through. Perhaps Debian will reverse their decision, but I suspect that it may now have enough momentum behind it that they won't. So I'm switching back to stable while I consider my options. (Gentto, Slackware, some BSD...) Fortunately, Debian normally maintains stable distributions for quite awhile, so I don't think there's a real push for a fast decision, and perhaps they'll change their minds before testing become stable.
Thank you for the information. I'd been considering MATE as an alternative to KDE. (xfce is nearly good enough, but not quite. I can use it for a week, and then I'll hit something that causes me to need to re-login as a KDE user.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that you're right, but perhaps you're ignoring one fact. Projects has an optimum number of contributors. Getting more than the optimum number is an actual hindrance to success. What that optimum number is varies with the project and with the management system. Sometimes the important thing is do get reasonable decisions made quickly. Sometimes it's important to smooth over people's feelings.
Linux has done well enough that I suspect that Linus has made nearly optimal choices given the available resources including his available time and energy, but also including the organizational structure, the management tools (both code and personnel), etc. I do feel that he might do a bit better if he had to make a few fewer personal decisions, but then some people would feel snubbed. I know that frequently things have gone back and forth several times before Linus acted in such a way as to close off debate (temporarily).
Guido manages. I'm not sure about Larry Wall, but I suspect so. Walter Bright manages.
Different people have different management styles. Linus' style *is* rather abrasive at times, but he gets the job done. (As do Guido and Walter Bright. Perl, however, seems to have stagnated.)
P.S.: I'm not a user of Perl, so someone more familiar with the community may well correct my opinions as an outside observer.
It's not an arbitrary point of "divergence", it's a retrospective one. You can't know that these two individuals who are siblings are members of a different species until considerably later you observe that their descendants can no longer interbreed (or never choose to do so). Picking those two individuals as the fork isn't arbitrary, but it's also impossible to do at the time, you can only do it by looking at their descendants.
It's not so much the generation time, as that rodents generally have a faster mutation rate than primates. Generation time is also significant, though as it allows less-viable variations to be more quickly weeded out.
I would like to see *some* evidence that "directed evolution" occurs without human intervention. Mind you, we don't usually try to create new species. At one time we couldn't, these days we occasionally do. (For an exception, Corn [Maize] is a different species from Teotsine, but I'm not sure you could say people created it rather than merely preserved it.)
Various 3rd parties bought both of them. The media have been purchased by non-media companies over the last 5 decades. Prior to that they were mainly small, and most of them were always on the edge of failure, so it wasn't that expensive. (Actually, the three major media networks of the time, NBC, CBS, and ABC were already controlled by people whose interest was not in the news, except in a minor way. But at that time most cities had two daily newspapers, one of which was still independent. And most radio stations were independent.)
My suspicion is that the network coverage of the Vietnam War caused those interested in power to notice that this was a way of pushing their views effectively. I'm sure they already knew it, since Hearst created the Spanish-American war, but people know lots of things they don't pay attention to. Still, the only evidence I have for the link is some suspicious timing.
And no president has been elected in the last century without the support of the major players. The last relatively independent one was FDR, Teddy Rooseveldt tried to break away and failed. Chester A. Arthur was elected with the support of one of the major players, but then reneged. (Once a president gets into office, he becomes partially immune to the players, and occasionally breaks free. Getting re-elected requires not only popular support, but regaining support of a major player. [See Teddy Rooseveldt, Bull-Moose Party.])
There were lots of records that were either destroyed, or conveyed at low price to parties hiding behind "cutouts" (possibly an incorrect usage). It's true these were company records, but they also included things of interest to, e.g., IBM, and which IBM would have paid more for than did the actual recipient. (I'd need to check over the names, but I believe that there were some that Novel would have greatly desire to see, also.)
Well, making it directional can be a problem. So can loss of containment. So it all depends...and it depends on things that we don't know.
One problem predicted for most designs of fusion reactor is that the materials used to build it become damaged by radiation until they are too fragile to work. This can take years, but when it does happen the entire core is high level radioactive waste. (That should be recycleable as a source of low grade heat, but you need the infrastructure in place to handle it. And as it decays the amount of heat produced naturally decays also. But it remains dangerous for quite awhile. Still, you'd think that a heat exchanger could safely extract the heat.)
Too much is unknown about this project to derive ANY conclusions. Some people are more cynical than others, but it's not as if there haven't been many reasons recently to inspire cynicism.
Not in the last several decades. Go back 60 years, though, and it's a different story.
Actually in my experience doctors rarely ask that. OTOH, the doctor I usually see knows me, and knows I rarely travel.
The problem here is that the initial symptoms are non-specific.
OTOH, I expect doctors will very soon start ASKING if you have travelled recently. (And maybe they usually do for new patients.)
If you've ever followed a bankruptcy, it must have been a very gentele one. I followed the SCO bankruptcy, which I hope was an exceptionally corrupt one, but I've no real basis for that hope. But I can gauarntee that you can't depend on anything being preserved.
Actually, I can see real advantages to "the cloud". I just don't see them making up for the vulnerabilities it creates. So if you have thorough backups, and sufficient connections that you could replace the cloud vendor in a day it it disappeared without warning, and sufficient protections that no leak or critical data can happen, then it sounds like a decent choice. But that's a lot of caveats, and few users seem to note them.
In a way it's sort of like outsourcing your IT department. You can't depend on the results as well, and if there are problems, you can't easily fix them. But the promise is that it will save you money. Sometimes it does, at least for awhile. Then the competent people are replaced with jerks, and you can't fix the problem, and you're tied into the contract.
Correction:
PARTS of the Federal Government will be able to get it's data regardless of what happens. But they won't admit it or share it even with other parts of the Federal Government.
The Federal Government is not monolithic. Many parts of it are even trying to do the best job they can. Unfortunately, the parts that are powerful are the parts that scheme at being more powerful.
Oil is visible, and there are currently regulations mandating that they clean up spills. Once there weren't, and in those times they didn't cleam them up, and the spills were a lot larger.
Note that companies have a strong financial interest not to leak methane: every 1% they leak is profit they are throwing away; you don't think big evil greedy capitalist corporations are going to throw away money like that?
They did with oil.
You can trace down the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, too. I'm not sure about the one about him throwing a half dollar over the Potomac.
IIRC from my school years, when the Spaniards landed in the new world, the Indians already had dogs, but not horses. If this is correct, as I assume, at least one of your assertions is factually inaccurate, unless you push "native dogs" back 10,000 years or more. It would be almost like saying Australia had no native dogs. Sort of a weird use of the language, even if defensible if you specify what you mean.
The problems are worse, but it has better coverage of Sailor Moon.
My wife also thinks there's a big difference between the Dems and the Repubs.
The measurements have shown that there are very significant, but unquantified, methane leaks. And the people doing the measurements were being paid by those who benefit from minimizing the significance of the leaks. One can't know what this means, but not being suspicious strikes me as naive.
OTOH, it's also unreasonable to believe that they are extremely dangerous. There no real evidence of that either. (Perhaps those earthquakes would have happened anyway, and anyway they were minor.) But there is significan evidence that the sides of the drilling are not being properly maintained against gas leaks. Also there is significant leakage around the drilling site. (This has always happened at oil wells, but when you're drilling for oil, the evidence is pretty clear, and the stuff can be collected and refined...though that's not a very profitable activity, so it won't happen without oversight.)
Fracking has also been responsible for a very large number of methane leaks. So many that it's reasonable to believe that there has actually been an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions, just a decline in measured ones. Which isn't the same thing.
OTOH, because the leaks haven't been accurately measured (Could they be?), you can't really say that there hasn't been a decline in greenhouse emissions. And both the companies and the politicians want to claim credit for a reduction. So there's little incentive to even try to get a good measurement, as long as you can just pretend that it doesn't matter.
A definite point. If you want to run Gnome3, you should probably strongly consider Fedora, or even Red Hat. They generally design the software they create to run well with their system. And they used to be pretty good about pushing out patches to bugs quickly.
OTOH, Fedora *is* the testing, or possibly the unstable, branch of Red Hat. If you don't want an unstable system, it may not be a good choice. (I'm pretty sure it's gotten better to use since it was re-branded from raw-hide, but I've used it so rarely [due to lilo vs. grub] that I'm not totally sure.)
The problem isn't the windows manager, it's systemd. I already run KDE, and sometimes xfce. I don't use Gnome3. But I also don't like to fight city hall. If the distro is seriously pushing systemd, then I'll use something else. But I also don't like deciding important things quickly. Right now that means avoiding anything that puts in a systemd dependency. And *that* means avoiding Gnome3...and everything that has it as a dependency.
A committe of developers that didn't have the authority intentionally miscalssified a decision and then rammed it through. Perhaps Debian will reverse their decision, but I suspect that it may now have enough momentum behind it that they won't. So I'm switching back to stable while I consider my options. (Gentto, Slackware, some BSD...) Fortunately, Debian normally maintains stable distributions for quite awhile, so I don't think there's a real push for a fast decision, and perhaps they'll change their minds before testing become stable.
Thank you for the information. I'd been considering MATE as an alternative to KDE. (xfce is nearly good enough, but not quite. I can use it for a week, and then I'll hit something that causes me to need to re-login as a KDE user.)