Are you complaining that you cant own a Uzi / AK-47 or are you complaining that you cant own an anti-aircraft gun? The gun advocates dont seem to realize that even if they whole world had guns, they citizens would be no match for the sophisticated weaponry owned by governments. Pray tell me what you would do with your machine guns when the government owns laser-guided missiles?
There is a known solution to your problem : digital signatures using cryptography. The problems of message integrity and sender authentication are addressed with this. Of course, it needs to be implemented in broadcast channels for this to be a solution, but if your problem becomes a widespread reality, thats exactly what will happen.
You have forgotten one thing. Movie companies who dont want to incur that risk have the choice to not allow broadcasting over digital formats. People who do choose to transmit in this format have to accept the risk that they may be recorded - which is the same as they currently incur with analog TV or radio. The fact that it is possible to commit piracy which this is no excuse for not allowing recording capability. After all, one can use fire to commit arson - but it is more commonly used for cooking and is pretty much essential to someone who wants more than salads or sushi.
I have to vigorously disagree with you on that point. A toddlers' mind isnt capable of understanding concepts that arent rooted in concrete images. So while a toddler might be capable of understanding what "home" : the object is, it may only be marginally capable of understanding "home" : the concept. Understanding "love" is probably beyond the capacity of a three year old - other than it realizing that this "love" thing has something to do with hugs and kisses.
Indeed, pictures are how we introduce children to the "virtual" world of concepts. First you show them images that they are familiar with. Then you progress to concepts related to images. And when their mind has matured much more - only then do they become capable of handling concepts which can only be expressed well via words.
PS. I've looked up some of your previous postings and you seem to have a dislike to using email (judging from some of your remarks). I would love to continue this converation off this site - so if you are interested, send me mail at the address, above.
Your point about the misleading metaphors is well-taken. However, which part of my comment do you think is wrong? It seems to me that you are talking about something other than the fact that the original author and I were talking about two slightly different points - but that fact doesnt make what I said wrong.
To quote : "Images are considered easier to understand and work with than text....The idea that images are less information dense or inferior to text starts earl with toddlers' picture books."
Now, I dont know about you, but I was under the impression that it is faster to digest information from an image than it is from text, and that that is the resaon why toddlers' books focus on presenting information via pictures.
Note that I am not saying that any one way of communication is superior to the other. Conveying information via text has a sense of formality to it : one needs to distill the salient features of an image to convey it in text, and this often brings a greater understanding to the recipient. On the other hand, there is a reason for the proverb "A picture is worth a thousand words" : the human brain is wired to accept information faster via images, rather than textual images containing the same info which need to be parsed prior to understanding.
And therein lies my principle objection to the essay. The author seems to be basing his thesis on this one point : that text is a simpler medium of communication of information. I disagree. I think it is just the opposite. I am not championing the superiority of GUI's vs the command line interface. I think that the example problem mentioned by the author (downloading files via ftp and not knowing what to do next) is a genuine problem - but it is a problem associated with the metaphors provided by the dominant GUI today : WinXX + internet. He has not shown that GUI's today are incapable of producing generalized understanding, or that there is a trend to sacrifice generalized understanding to the altar of "ease of use" - which is what he decries.
Where I work at, it is very evident that there is a difference between being trained in Computer Science / Engineering, and coming into the computer field via some round about way. Clearly the people who have had the benefit of the training find solutions faster and often come up with neater solutions than their collegues who have been on the job much longer.
That has been my empirical observation throughout my 8 year career. The trained simply do better. While there may be some semblance of parity at the grunt-worker level, the trained workers make much better software architects, and designers. And when it comes to system software, very few amateurs are even in the field. So, yes, you can survive in the computer field without a degree, but your options are probably smaller.
While I would tend to agree with most of your sentiments, I collapsed laughing when I read your opening sentence. As a contractor working at a major company (which has a 3-letter acronym), I find myself getting paid overtime, while their employees sign on for a 40-hour week, are expected to put in 44 hours (or they dont get promoted), and are once in a while told to put in overtime taking their weekly hours from anywhere from 50 to 60 hours. They dont get paid overtime.
Can anyone tell me why? Is there something fundamentally wrong with this patch that prevents it from being merged into the standard kernel? I cant boot except through my Promise card supported UDMA 66 bus, so it is very annoying to have to get a patch from elsewhere, patch the kernel and then recompile.
I know, because I recently asked this question on the OSI license discussion list. The major flaws in the Plan 9 license being that AT&T can require you to provide your private changes (ones that you havent distributed to anyone), and also revoke your ability to use the code should you file suit against AT&T.
I only bring this up because the interview incorrectly refers to this OS as "Open-source". It isnt.
Hindi is, and will continue to be for a long time, the official language of India. It is spoken by over 50% of the Indian population. No other Indian language, or English comes close percentage-wise.
English is indeed a unifying language - but only among the technological or otherwise educated elite. I use the word "technological" as an adjective here : the people who are trained in technology are very few in number, and they make more money than the average Joe. The average Joe speaks the regional language, and (most of the time) some Hindi.
...because they may not have a clue on how to apply them correctly.
People have been saying about India for the past 20 years that it is a sleeping (technological) giant about to awaken. Well....I see no reason for that statement to change. The relationship between India and the US is not likely to change in the near future : the US will still be the leader, and India will still be the follower.
Why is this relevant? Because right now, barely.5% of the Indian population (this is an optimistic figure, I think) are on the net. And unless, India wakes up, this figure is unlikely to increase beyond 2% over the next 10 years. I've been there recently, and other than the recent dot-com mania affecting it too, there were no fundamental changes taking place that would awaken India.
The dominant language in any culture will be the language used by the largest segment of the population. So what does this say about whether Hindi should be treated as a more "popular" language than English?
I dont have any feel for how many people in China use the web. Anyone of Chinese origin care to enlighten me?
One of the problems with Open-source advocacy (which I must stress is different from free-software advocacy), is that their definition of "better" is very narrow minded. "Better" to them means (more often than not - there are exceptions, to be sure) more stable, and not that a program actually helps a user to do a given task better. This fosters the attitude that the user-interface is less important to the program, than functionality.
I'm sad to say it, but Microsoft has this gauged exactly right : they release buggy products with just enough quality to hop over the bug-tolerance horizon for most of their user base and with a superior user experience. Of what use is a bug-free product, if the user who uses it is so frustrated that they stop using the product?
There are objects (asteroids, comets, etc) raining down on the various planetary bodies / satellites in our solar system. If there are any living organisms on those objects, they could be considered to be contaminating Europa too (if they land on Europa, that is). Such a situation wouldnt be regarded by us as "contamination".
Consider the following situation : Very primitive life has evolved on Europa. Along comes an asteroid with a virus / bacteria that is harmful to the life on Europa, and wipes out that life. Natural evolution - is it not? Why wouldnt the introducting of lifeforms from earth be regarded as part of evolution. After all, if we ignore the fact that we are "intelligent" / "concious" and look solely at the bottom line (what we do rather than why we do what we do), the event of humans contaminating another planet is nothing drastically different than an asteroid carrying lifeforms crashing into Europa.
Admittedly, it would be of great scientific interest to know that if life arose on Europa, it arose by itself, and without any human intervention. But if we discover life on Europa, it doesnt mean that that life originated on Europa, anyway. So why bother?
I think you are confusing a problem with a solution to a problem. If a user sees a problem, it is perfectly valid for the user to describe the problem. Depending on the user's viewpoint, the severity assigned to the problem may vary.
What you are talking about is a solution to a problem. That is upto a designer / implementer. If they choose a poor implementation - that is their problem. Sometimes, (as in the case you described), any solution is a bad one. So what? Nobody loses if a user describes their problem anyway?
What particularly ticked me off in the article was the statement that because their UI designer was submitting all these bugs, one of the possible consequences for KDE would be a dumbing down. The users, it was claimed were good enough at determining what a good GUI was.
My question is : what user group is being talked about? Are we talking about the same user group that understands the X-protocol, and knows what to do with netstat, and thinks 'vi' is the best editor (it is, but there is no denying that it is hard to reach an intuitive level with 'vi'? These are not the same users that Corel is trying to win over. As long as the acknowledged goal of any software product is to increase its user base, I dont see any problems with a commercial company with the same goals filing such defects.
One of the things that did cross my mind after reading this was : how does this behave over time? After all the shape of different components of the human body changes rather dramatically over time. Would you have to measure the aberrations every 10 years and correct for them? Every 5 years? Every year after the age of 65? Who knows.
Another thing to consider is the degradation of color sensitivity of the human eye in old age. The gradual clouding of the ocular liquid (which in extreme cases is a cataract) is a natural process and causes a shift in the color sensitivity of the eye. The blues and the greens become barely visible, and the reds tend to dominate. It becomes very hard to distinguish a red traffic signal from a sunset background, and the green signal is barely visible. The device that is mentioned is thus going to be of limited use for the older folks.
Note that older folks have a problem with their reflex times too - which is another reason they shouldnt drive.
With the rather sweeping powers that are assigned to these bots, it is rather easy to imagine a time where the behavioural complexity of the bots overcomes the ability of human analysts to distinguish between programmed-for behaviour and errant behaviour. Unless, that is, there is a theoretical foundation for bot algorithms that can guarantee that the operations done by the bots will not corrupt computational imtegrity.
For example, in the worst case scenario, let us assume that the bots are written with behaviour so complex that they become self-modifiable and have a goal of survival. Hypothetically, one of the things the bot could do is to ensure its survival by (1) propagating itself over the network (i.e. virus like behaviour) and (2) disabling all the sysadmin tools that could be used to wipe out the bot by a sysadmin.
Admittedly, this is kind of a sci-fi like behaviour, but then, WAP devices could have fit in very well into 1930's sci-fi. Are there any theoretical results that indicate that such a scenario is not possible. If it is possible, is there a well-defined set of bot operations that is "safe" to code for when making a bot?
Then don't! Thats one thing many "web authors" still don't get... The WWW is a text-oriented medium. It's a page of text that has links to other pages of text. Everything else is just cruft.
I have to disagree with you there. Undoubtedly, the web started out as and was designed for a text oriented medium of information propagation. However, it is also true that it has outgrown its original design. How else do you explain "IMG" tags? Why would they be required in a txt only medium?
Yes there are limitations originating from its design goal that generate a sense of awkwardness when implementing graphic oriented pages. However, there are principles of web page design which can be followed to minimize the awkwardness. Graphics is now very much on the web : deal with it the best you can. Closing your eyes and hoping it will go away is not a good solution.
I have no solution for the original problem posed regarding programming for multiple browsers. This is inded a bitch. But the one about multiple resolutions is much more easily fixed : program your webpages to a fixed resolution. I contract at IBM, and IBM's standard is that the webpage must be displayable on a 640x480 resolution without having to scroll. There are exceptions to this rule of course, but these sites need to get approval for exceptions from higher up.
Alright, the Indian population is estimated at close to a billion people. But this does not constitute a potential market of a billion people.
For starters, lets look at the literacy rate. Slightly more than the 50% of the Indian population are literate. where the Indian government defines being literate as the ability to read and write a letter.
Now lets look at affordability. About 30% of the people live around or below the poverty line - which is a hand-to-mouth existence. For such people, the basic necessities of life like food, clothing, and shelter are more of a priority than being able to surf the web.
And what about the infrastructure? Telecommunication quality in India sucks when compared to western standards. While I have never used a modem in India, I would not be surprised to hear that 28.8K speeds are the upper limit of what can be achieved over normal phone lines. High speed access is mostly a dream. The top-end educational and research institutes (one of which is where the good professor is located) do have high speed access - but we are talking about the common man - not the engineers who earn 10 times what the common man makes.
And last, but not least, lets look at the languages. The Sahitya Academy (the premier institute in India dealing with Indian literature) considers 21 languages worthy of study. These many language constitute a divisive force in getting things to work. It would be far better to improve the standard of education in English, since the people who cant afford to learn English would probably be the same people who cant afford to use the web.
In other words, while Prof. Hariharan may be right about free OS'es being most-suited for India (mainly due to economic reasons), it is wrong to think that it means a huge increase in the free-software community.
Are you concerned about the slow speed of Debian's release cycles? How do you plan to promote your Linux distribution over competitors who have more up to date packages on their distributions?
If you look at the IDE provided by the IBM VisualAge C++ compiler, it provides incremental compiles. So, if you only change a comment within the file, the file wont be recompiled. Again, if a particular function was changed in a manner that didnt impact the rest of the file, only the code for that function is recompiled. This vastly reduces "make" time. Of course, this needs to be supported by the compiler too, but then both the compiler and make are GNU tools, so atleast in theory, this is possible...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you complaining that you cant own a Uzi / AK-47 or are you complaining that you cant own an anti-aircraft gun? The gun advocates dont seem to realize that even if they whole world had guns, they citizens would be no match for the sophisticated weaponry owned by governments. Pray tell me what you would do with your machine guns when the government owns laser-guided missiles?
There is a known solution to your problem : digital signatures using cryptography. The problems of message integrity and sender authentication are addressed with this. Of course, it needs to be implemented in broadcast channels for this to be a solution, but if your problem becomes a widespread reality, thats exactly what will happen.
You have forgotten one thing. Movie companies who dont want to incur that risk have the choice to not allow broadcasting over digital formats. People who do choose to transmit in this format have to accept the risk that they may be recorded - which is the same as they currently incur with analog TV or radio. The fact that it is possible to commit piracy which this is no excuse for not allowing recording capability. After all, one can use fire to commit arson - but it is more commonly used for cooking and is pretty much essential to someone who wants more than salads or sushi.
I have to vigorously disagree with you on that point. A toddlers' mind isnt capable of understanding concepts that arent rooted in concrete images. So while a toddler might be capable of understanding what "home" : the object is, it may only be marginally capable of understanding "home" : the concept. Understanding "love" is probably beyond the capacity of a three year old - other than it realizing that this "love" thing has something to do with hugs and kisses.
Indeed, pictures are how we introduce children to the "virtual" world of concepts. First you show them images that they are familiar with. Then you progress to concepts related to images. And when their mind has matured much more - only then do they become capable of handling concepts which can only be expressed well via words.
PS. I've looked up some of your previous postings and you seem to have a dislike to using email (judging from some of your remarks). I would love to continue this converation off this site - so if you are interested, send me mail at the address, above.
Your point about the misleading metaphors is well-taken. However, which part of my comment do you think is wrong? It seems to me that you are talking about something other than the fact that the original author and I were talking about two slightly different points - but that fact doesnt make what I said wrong.
I guess the moderators havent tumbled onto the fact that the guy posting above is the author of the article we are all commenting on.
To quote : "Images are considered easier to understand and work with than text....The idea that images are less information dense or inferior to text starts earl with toddlers' picture books."
Now, I dont know about you, but I was under the impression that it is faster to digest information from an image than it is from text, and that that is the resaon why toddlers' books focus on presenting information via pictures.
Note that I am not saying that any one way of communication is superior to the other. Conveying information via text has a sense of formality to it : one needs to distill the salient features of an image to convey it in text, and this often brings a greater understanding to the recipient. On the other hand, there is a reason for the proverb "A picture is worth a thousand words" : the human brain is wired to accept information faster via images, rather than textual images containing the same info which need to be parsed prior to understanding.
And therein lies my principle objection to the essay. The author seems to be basing his thesis on this one point : that text is a simpler medium of communication of information. I disagree. I think it is just the opposite. I am not championing the superiority of GUI's vs the command line interface. I think that the example problem mentioned by the author (downloading files via ftp and not knowing what to do next) is a genuine problem - but it is a problem associated with the metaphors provided by the dominant GUI today : WinXX + internet. He has not shown that GUI's today are incapable of producing generalized understanding, or that there is a trend to sacrifice generalized understanding to the altar of "ease of use" - which is what he decries.
Where I work at, it is very evident that there is a difference between being trained in Computer Science / Engineering, and coming into the computer field via some round about way. Clearly the people who have had the benefit of the training find solutions faster and often come up with neater solutions than their collegues who have been on the job much longer.
That has been my empirical observation throughout my 8 year career. The trained simply do better. While there may be some semblance of parity at the grunt-worker level, the trained workers make much better software architects, and designers. And when it comes to system software, very few amateurs are even in the field. So, yes, you can survive in the computer field without a degree, but your options are probably smaller.
While I would tend to agree with most of your sentiments, I collapsed laughing when I read your opening sentence. As a contractor working at a major company (which has a 3-letter acronym), I find myself getting paid overtime, while their employees sign on for a 40-hour week, are expected to put in 44 hours (or they dont get promoted), and are once in a while told to put in overtime taking their weekly hours from anywhere from 50 to 60 hours. They dont get paid overtime.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/126233.sht ml
Hasnt Bob learnt anything from the previous episodes? How about these :
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/27/1353200.sh tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/06/213259.sht ml
Can anyone tell me why? Is there something fundamentally wrong with this patch that prevents it from being merged into the standard kernel? I cant boot except through my Promise card supported UDMA 66 bus, so it is very annoying to have to get a patch from elsewhere, patch the kernel and then recompile.
I know, because I recently asked this question on the OSI license discussion list. The major flaws in the Plan 9 license being that AT&T can require you to provide your private changes (ones that you havent distributed to anyone), and also revoke your ability to use the code should you file suit against AT&T.
I only bring this up because the interview incorrectly refers to this OS as "Open-source". It isnt.
Sorry, but you are way off.
Hindi is, and will continue to be for a long time, the official language of India. It is spoken by over 50% of the Indian population. No other Indian language, or English comes close percentage-wise.
English is indeed a unifying language - but only among the technological or otherwise educated elite. I use the word "technological" as an adjective here : the people who are trained in technology are very few in number, and they make more money than the average Joe. The average Joe speaks the regional language, and (most of the time) some Hindi.
...because they may not have a clue on how to apply them correctly.
People have been saying about India for the past 20 years that it is a sleeping (technological) giant about to awaken. Well....I see no reason for that statement to change. The relationship between India and the US is not likely to change in the near future : the US will still be the leader, and India will still be the follower.
Why is this relevant? Because right now, barely .5% of the Indian population (this is an optimistic figure, I think) are on the net. And unless, India wakes up, this figure is unlikely to increase beyond 2% over the next 10 years. I've been there recently, and other than the recent dot-com mania affecting it too, there were no fundamental changes taking place that would awaken India.
The dominant language in any culture will be the language used by the largest segment of the population. So what does this say about whether Hindi should be treated as a more "popular" language than English?
I dont have any feel for how many people in China use the web. Anyone of Chinese origin care to enlighten me?
...and since you dont seem to be from this planet, I guess the SETI project can stop its work now.
Its the license, stupid.
...and took the words right out of my mouth.
One of the problems with Open-source advocacy (which I must stress is different from free-software advocacy), is that their definition of "better" is very narrow minded. "Better" to them means (more often than not - there are exceptions, to be sure) more stable, and not that a program actually helps a user to do a given task better. This fosters the attitude that the user-interface is less important to the program, than functionality.
I'm sad to say it, but Microsoft has this gauged exactly right : they release buggy products with just enough quality to hop over the bug-tolerance horizon for most of their user base and with a superior user experience. Of what use is a bug-free product, if the user who uses it is so frustrated that they stop using the product?
There are objects (asteroids, comets, etc) raining down on the various planetary bodies / satellites in our solar system. If there are any living organisms on those objects, they could be considered to be contaminating Europa too (if they land on Europa, that is). Such a situation wouldnt be regarded by us as "contamination".
Consider the following situation : Very primitive life has evolved on Europa. Along comes an asteroid with a virus / bacteria that is harmful to the life on Europa, and wipes out that life. Natural evolution - is it not? Why wouldnt the introducting of lifeforms from earth be regarded as part of evolution. After all, if we ignore the fact that we are "intelligent" / "concious" and look solely at the bottom line (what we do rather than why we do what we do), the event of humans contaminating another planet is nothing drastically different than an asteroid carrying lifeforms crashing into Europa.
Admittedly, it would be of great scientific interest to know that if life arose on Europa, it arose by itself, and without any human intervention. But if we discover life on Europa, it doesnt mean that that life originated on Europa, anyway. So why bother?
I think you are confusing a problem with a solution to a problem. If a user sees a problem, it is perfectly valid for the user to describe the problem. Depending on the user's viewpoint, the severity assigned to the problem may vary.
What you are talking about is a solution to a problem. That is upto a designer / implementer. If they choose a poor implementation - that is their problem. Sometimes, (as in the case you described), any solution is a bad one. So what? Nobody loses if a user describes their problem anyway?
What particularly ticked me off in the article was the statement that because their UI designer was submitting all these bugs, one of the possible consequences for KDE would be a dumbing down. The users, it was claimed were good enough at determining what a good GUI was.
My question is : what user group is being talked about? Are we talking about the same user group that understands the X-protocol, and knows what to do with netstat, and thinks 'vi' is the best editor (it is, but there is no denying that it is hard to reach an intuitive level with 'vi'? These are not the same users that Corel is trying to win over. As long as the acknowledged goal of any software product is to increase its user base, I dont see any problems with a commercial company with the same goals filing such defects.
I applaud your caution.
One of the things that did cross my mind after reading this was : how does this behave over time? After all the shape of different components of the human body changes rather dramatically over time. Would you have to measure the aberrations every 10 years and correct for them? Every 5 years? Every year after the age of 65? Who knows.
Another thing to consider is the degradation of color sensitivity of the human eye in old age. The gradual clouding of the ocular liquid (which in extreme cases is a cataract) is a natural process and causes a shift in the color sensitivity of the eye. The blues and the greens become barely visible, and the reds tend to dominate. It becomes very hard to distinguish a red traffic signal from a sunset background, and the green signal is barely visible. The device that is mentioned is thus going to be of limited use for the older folks.
Note that older folks have a problem with their reflex times too - which is another reason they shouldnt drive.
With the rather sweeping powers that are assigned to these bots, it is rather easy to imagine a time where the behavioural complexity of the bots overcomes the ability of human analysts to distinguish between programmed-for behaviour and errant behaviour. Unless, that is, there is a theoretical foundation for bot algorithms that can guarantee that the operations done by the bots will not corrupt computational imtegrity.
For example, in the worst case scenario, let us assume that the bots are written with behaviour so complex that they become self-modifiable and have a goal of survival. Hypothetically, one of the things the bot could do is to ensure its survival by (1) propagating itself over the network (i.e. virus like behaviour) and (2) disabling all the sysadmin tools that could be used to wipe out the bot by a sysadmin.
Admittedly, this is kind of a sci-fi like behaviour, but then, WAP devices could have fit in very well into 1930's sci-fi. Are there any theoretical results that indicate that such a scenario is not possible. If it is possible, is there a well-defined set of bot operations that is "safe" to code for when making a bot?
I have to disagree with you there. Undoubtedly, the web started out as and was designed for a text oriented medium of information propagation. However, it is also true that it has outgrown its original design. How else do you explain "IMG" tags? Why would they be required in a txt only medium?
Yes there are limitations originating from its design goal that generate a sense of awkwardness when implementing graphic oriented pages. However, there are principles of web page design which can be followed to minimize the awkwardness. Graphics is now very much on the web : deal with it the best you can. Closing your eyes and hoping it will go away is not a good solution.
I have no solution for the original problem posed regarding programming for multiple browsers. This is inded a bitch. But the one about multiple resolutions is much more easily fixed : program your webpages to a fixed resolution. I contract at IBM, and IBM's standard is that the webpage must be displayable on a 640x480 resolution without having to scroll. There are exceptions to this rule of course, but these sites need to get approval for exceptions from higher up.
Alright, the Indian population is estimated at close to a billion people. But this does not constitute a potential market of a billion people.
For starters, lets look at the literacy rate. Slightly more than the 50% of the Indian population are literate. where the Indian government defines being literate as the ability to read and write a letter.
Now lets look at affordability. About 30% of the people live around or below the poverty line - which is a hand-to-mouth existence. For such people, the basic necessities of life like food, clothing, and shelter are more of a priority than being able to surf the web.
And what about the infrastructure? Telecommunication quality in India sucks when compared to western standards. While I have never used a modem in India, I would not be surprised to hear that 28.8K speeds are the upper limit of what can be achieved over normal phone lines. High speed access is mostly a dream. The top-end educational and research institutes (one of which is where the good professor is located) do have high speed access - but we are talking about the common man - not the engineers who earn 10 times what the common man makes.
And last, but not least, lets look at the languages. The Sahitya Academy (the premier institute in India dealing with Indian literature) considers 21 languages worthy of study. These many language constitute a divisive force in getting things to work. It would be far better to improve the standard of education in English, since the people who cant afford to learn English would probably be the same people who cant afford to use the web.
In other words, while Prof. Hariharan may be right about free OS'es being most-suited for India (mainly due to economic reasons), it is wrong to think that it means a huge increase in the free-software community.
Are you concerned about the slow speed of Debian's release cycles? How do you plan to promote your Linux distribution over competitors who have more up to date packages on their distributions?
Incremental compiles.
If you look at the IDE provided by the IBM VisualAge C++ compiler, it provides incremental compiles. So, if you only change a comment within the file, the file wont be recompiled. Again, if a particular function was changed in a manner that didnt impact the rest of the file, only the code for that function is recompiled. This vastly reduces "make" time. Of course, this needs to be supported by the compiler too, but then both the compiler and make are GNU tools, so atleast in theory, this is possible...