If you follow some of the links from the article, it talks about productivity doubling since using BitKeeper.
it does, but it says that the increase in productivity came mostly from the fact that certain 'features' in bitkeeper forced him to depend more on other kernel maintainers he trusted. while this is certainly a good thing, it doesn't sound like it was really bitkeeper itself that caused the improvement.
regardless, i think you are right on your other point. at the time, there just weren't any real alternatives to bitkeeper...
i think that most (not all) people would have been a lot calmer about the issue had it not been for the license clause about not working on any competing projects. i can completely understand why somebody who worked on the kernel wouldn't like being told what other projects they could or couldn't work on in their spare time, just as i wouldn't appreciate my work telling me what i could and could not spend ny free time doing.
anyway, i think he's being a little blind if he thinks his organization is as friendy as any to open source. sure, they're friendly to open source, as long as it isn't competing with them. sorry buddy, that's not the way it works.
and his comment about marines and disciplining the 'bad apples' is nothing short of ludicrous. it's not up to the free software community to discipline somebody for the decisions they make on how to spend their free time.
yeah, me too. it was almost three years ago (july 2002).
i was fishing with my dad, my grandpa, and a couple of my uncles on one of the lakes that straddles the Canadian border. We got in a boat on the US side, motored partway across the lake, and stopped at a dock a little ways across the 'border'. we stood on the dock for a while, until a canadian customs agent came out and asked us where were were going, how long, and if we had any alcohol. I don't remember if she looked at ID's or not, but if she did, she couldn't have done more than glance at them. she did write down the registration of the boat, but i think that was about it. we spent the week at my uncles cabin, on the canadian side of the lake, and when it was time to come home, we motored back to a little island with a phone booth on it. inside the booth was a little camera. my uncle dialed the number posted on the pooth and looked into the camera. he told the guy on the other end that we were coming back from canada. the guy asked, 'how long were you there?'. just over a week. 'how many of you are there?' 4 (the other three had come out earlier in a separate boat) 'ok, have a nice day.'
that was it....
alternatively, i have also heard stories of how my great grandfather, who was born in america to german immigrants, was trapped on the mackinaw (?) bridge with his family. american customs wouldn't let him in because they said he was a german spy, and once they found out the americans wouldn't let him in, the canadians didn't want him either. he ended up walking back and forth on the bridge from one customs office to the other until he finally managed to convince one side or the other (i forget which) that he really was an american citizen who lived in michigan.
Unless you're wealthy enough to afford a personal jet, you can't fly without the equivalent of showing a passport. (see freetotravel.org)
Bullsh*T, my wife just did it over Christmas. Just tell them you forgot your ID, or lost it a week before. They'll still let you on the plane, you just have to spend a little longer in the security line. I did it once too. I was flying to Washington D.C. about 3 months after 9/11, and my ID fell out of my pocket on the flight out. The airline mailed it back to me, but I still had to get on the flight home. They let me on when I flashed my student ID (although I doubt I could get away with that again- Argenbright were still working security at the airport there even though they had their contract pulled some time before that, so I don't think they cared too much.)
Of course, all of this depends on what your definition of travelling at a reasonable speed is. In my experience, a trip of 500 miles doesn't take much if any longer to drive than it does to fly, once you consider you have to get to the airport, get there and hour and a half early, get a car or get picked up at your destination airport, get from the destination airport to your real destination.... By that point, you're comparing an 8 hour drive with two one hour drives, an hour and a half flight, possibly a layover, another hour and a half in the airport(s).... Flying just doesn't seem worth it if your going somewhere you can drive in a day- either way your day is mostly shot.
Yo It allows the service providers to be the ultimate arbiters of how data is transmitted to and from the phones... Everyone else is apparently fine paying the disproportionately large transmission fees for picture and text messages.
a little over a year ago i went out of my way to buy a bluetooth enabled phone. i never used it once. when i couldn't stand using that lemon of a phone (sony ericsson t616) any longer i got a new samsung. no bluetooth. no camera. no infrared.
and you know what? i don't pay a cent for picture or text messages.
I wouldn't say that people look down on redhat for asking for money, so much as they like having an alternative when the money isn't necessary.
for example, i worked with a company who was looking to deploy their servers on a new platform. The initial development was done on FreeBSD, but we were looking at using Red Hat Enterprise Linux when the time finally came for full scale deployment. We had no problem with paying for the Red Hat Enterprise subscription on our production servers, but we wanted to be able to test the software on Red Hat before committing to the subscription. We set up a testing server with White Box Linux to verify compatibility before making the subscription commitment. Our development systems and backup servers continued to run White Box Linux after the deployment as well, as we did not see the value of paying a RedHat Subscription on those machines.
Also, a lot of people have criticixed Red Hat for not having a reasonable licensing structure for educational institutions, cluster setups, etc. After all, White Box Linux was written for a library when it was determined that the cost of an enterprise subscription for all of their servers would have been greater than the value of their hardware.
this one could actually be funny if it came from someone remotely associated with microsoft- an employee blog or something. or maybe 'leaked' by one of microsoft's partners. but not when it comes from some random editorial journalist.
and now the truth comes out.... i knew it was too good to be true that the mysql developers were backtracking on ten years of defending their design decisions- now we know that all of this talk about triggers, stored procedures, etc. was just the leadup to an elaborate april fools prank. clever...
No. It's April 1st. It's Slashdot. This has been a regular occurence since the beginning of Slashdot.
Not exactly. Long ago, back even before there were user accounts on slashdot, most of the news on April Fools day was normal news, with a few barely plausible fictional articles mixed in. They usually tried to make sure that they included a few barely plausible real stories as well, to really mix things up. It made April Fool's day interesting, because you actually had to stop and think about whether each article was true or not. Of course, for the last few years, the 'Fools' articles are so ridiculous, and the real articles so mundane, that it's become pretty lame.
Just another sign that Taco et al have gone from doing something they really love to doing the least amount of work possible to make a living.
as opposed to now, where there is a nice convenient button for users to push to delete all of the sensitive data they store on their computer before they sell it?
oh wait, there isn't.... it's not like nobody has ever stored personal information on their computer before now, you know.
So, are they just going to pretend that 10 years worth of flaming on message boards, mailing lists, etc. about how you don't really want those features in your rdbms because you can just implement them in application code without slowing down the database never actually happened?
not like there aren't plenty of other excuses to go to vegas. this year, i'm going to my wife to the aia convention in las vegas (aia == american institute of architects, not to be confused with aa, even if it is hard to tell the difference sometimes.)
i'd rather go to an architect's convention than a computer one anyway.
Memorize three "good" passwords (as in, more-or-less indistinguishable from a string of random characters). Use one for public purposes (ie, normal websites), one for normal moderate security use (normal user accounts at work and home), and reserve the last one for root/admin accounts and online financial sites.
This is more or less what i (used to) do, with one exception. i would never use a password that is used for a shell account on one of my machines for anything over the web, especially given some of the stupid things i've seen banks do with the passwords i provide.
my suggestion would be something like this:
1) websites that don't deal with any finanical information (/., download sites that require a login, newspapers that require registration, etc.) 2) websites that do deal with financial information (bank, credit cards, paypal, etc. 3) webmail accounts 4) user level shell accounts 5) admin level shell accounts
it requires you to remember a little more, but it improves separation substantially. also, for most casual computer users levels 4 and 5 may not be an issue anyway whcih brings the required number of base passwords down.
recently though, i've had to start diversifying passwords. level 1 is still the same as it was, but level 2 has gotten split into a few different passwords after i got married and my wife started dealing with the checking accounts and uch, and in levels 3-5 pretty much everything gets it's own password these days because i have email accounts and shell accounts on computers owned by multiple different companies, so it seems prudent to me to keep different passwords for them.
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
Even if the program assumes that "gates" is a plural common noun, and not a singular proper noun, shouldn't a remotely decent grammar checker still find fault with this sentence (beyond it's nonsensical nature)? Along with accidentally repeated double words, mixing singular and plural nouns/verbs is one lf the only things that the grammar check seems to actually be good for.
It seems like a halfway decent grammar checker in this case would at least recommend "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft"
i have to agree with you. i just finished installing suse professional on a dual 500MHz machine with a rage 128 and everything works great. and i still use FreeBSD+Gnome 2.? on my dual ppro 200 with a mach 64 relatively often as well. the ppro is a bit sluggish, but still usable for most tasks. unfortunately new memory for that system (which i think is all it really needs) is way too expensive to be worthwile and the main scsi disk is starting to make funny noises.
if you rtfa, i suspect the system you are describing as actually faster than the one in the videos. it doesn't specifiaclly mention processor speed, but it does say that the graphics cards are an intel i830, and an ati 7500 mobility. i think that my old 800 MHz Dell had about the same level of graphics hardware as these laptops, so i would doubt they are much faster than that. eyecandy doesn't have to mean slow- in fact if you are using some of the very basic and mostly unused 3d acceleration features of even 5 year old video cards, you could make a desktop that much snappier than most current systems.
also, transparency can have it's uses. while i wouldn't want transparent windows, i think that semi transparent dialog boxes could be useful if done right.
while i don't remember ever having a maxtor drive go bad on me, i still doubt i would ever buy another one. from my personal experience, i'd agree that there isn't one brand of drive that is more or less reliable than any other (except maybe western digital on the bad side, but that may be just margin of error)
however, there are a lot of other factors to consider when buying hard drives. the last few maxtors i bought all sounded like shaking a can full of nails when they were seeking. lately, i only buy seagate drives. they seem to be at least as reliable as anything else out there, if not more so, and they are by far the quietest drives on the market.
some of us don't think $1 per song is that cheap. in fact it's more expensive than many cd's if you actually do want the whole thing. give it to me for a quarter or two per song (preferably lossless, or at least let me choose the bitrate) and i'll think about it again. i don't even really care about drm that much, as long as i can choose what player i want to play the music in- most of my existing library is in OGG format, which isn't supported in iTunes.
while becoming sufficiently famous to trade on my name to make loads of money elsewhere
not likely, because the music industry will own your name and pretty much everything you do after you sign a contract with them for as long as the contract is in effect. and most times the contract is in effect for as long as they want it to be, because it specifies a certain number of releases, and they get to decide what constitutes a release. they can make millions off the first three albums in a four album contract, and then sit on your fourth one for years just to keep you from jumping ship.
Best of all, some of those fees are flat, one-time payouts, so my take of the next million would be significantly higher.
assuming that there is a next million. remember above where the studio decides what you get to release and what you don't. you're also assuming that there won't be any new "one-time payouts"...
It looks to me like a lot of #1 and a little bit of #3. The pictures are definitely poor quality, you can tell from looking at the other (non-laptop) objects, people, etc. in the shots- bad focus and worse lighting. You can tell from the shots around the PCMCIA slots that the case is certainly not perfect, but overall, the pictures make it hard to tell just how good (or poor) the case really is.
And the 10% who run opera/mozilla are the ones who usually run ad blocking software, so you can fuck them anyway without any real loss in revenue.
while this logic is flawed in so many ways it's no funny, i'll only point out the obvious: this only applies if your revenue comes entirely from ads, which is very often not the case. (think online banking, ebay, any online store, online stock brokers, any site where you pay for a subscription to get access, any site such as msdn where the website exists to support an external source of revenue...)
Slashdot Mirror
If you follow some of the links from the article, it talks about productivity doubling since using BitKeeper.
it does, but it says that the increase in productivity came mostly from the fact that certain 'features' in bitkeeper forced him to depend more on other kernel maintainers he trusted. while this is certainly a good thing, it doesn't sound like it was really bitkeeper itself that caused the improvement.
regardless, i think you are right on your other point. at the time, there just weren't any real alternatives to bitkeeper...
i think that most (not all) people would have been a lot calmer about the issue had it not been for the license clause about not working on any competing projects. i can completely understand why somebody who worked on the kernel wouldn't like being told what other projects they could or couldn't work on in their spare time, just as i wouldn't appreciate my work telling me what i could and could not spend ny free time doing.
anyway, i think he's being a little blind if he thinks his organization is as friendy as any to open source. sure, they're friendly to open source, as long as it isn't competing with them. sorry buddy, that's not the way it works.
and his comment about marines and disciplining the 'bad apples' is nothing short of ludicrous. it's not up to the free software community to discipline somebody for the decisions they make on how to spend their free time.
yeah, me too. it was almost three years ago (july 2002).
i was fishing with my dad, my grandpa, and a couple of my uncles on one of the lakes that straddles the Canadian border. We got in a boat on the US side, motored partway across the lake, and stopped at a dock a little ways across the 'border'. we stood on the dock for a while, until a canadian customs agent came out and asked us where were were going, how long, and if we had any alcohol. I don't remember if she looked at ID's or not, but if she did, she couldn't have done more than glance at them. she did write down the registration of the boat, but i think that was about it. we spent the week at my uncles cabin, on the canadian side of the lake, and when it was time to come home, we motored back to a little island with a phone booth on it. inside the booth was a little camera. my uncle dialed the number posted on the pooth and looked into the camera. he told the guy on the other end that we were coming back from canada. the guy asked, 'how long were you there?'. just over a week. 'how many of you are there?' 4 (the other three had come out earlier in a separate boat) 'ok, have a nice day.'
that was it....
alternatively, i have also heard stories of how my great grandfather, who was born in america to german immigrants, was trapped on the mackinaw (?) bridge with his family. american customs wouldn't let him in because they said he was a german spy, and once they found out the americans wouldn't let him in, the canadians didn't want him either. he ended up walking back and forth on the bridge from one customs office to the other until he finally managed to convince one side or the other (i forget which) that he really was an american citizen who lived in michigan.
Unless you're wealthy enough to afford a personal jet, you can't fly without the equivalent of showing a passport. (see freetotravel.org)
Bullsh*T, my wife just did it over Christmas. Just tell them you forgot your ID, or lost it a week before. They'll still let you on the plane, you just have to spend a little longer in the security line. I did it once too. I was flying to Washington D.C. about 3 months after 9/11, and my ID fell out of my pocket on the flight out. The airline mailed it back to me, but I still had to get on the flight home. They let me on when I flashed my student ID (although I doubt I could get away with that again- Argenbright were still working security at the airport there even though they had their contract pulled some time before that, so I don't think they cared too much.)
Of course, all of this depends on what your definition of travelling at a reasonable speed is. In my experience, a trip of 500 miles doesn't take much if any longer to drive than it does to fly, once you consider you have to get to the airport, get there and hour and a half early, get a car or get picked up at your destination airport, get from the destination airport to your real destination.... By that point, you're comparing an 8 hour drive with two one hour drives, an hour and a half flight, possibly a layover, another hour and a half in the airport(s).... Flying just doesn't seem worth it if your going somewhere you can drive in a day- either way your day is mostly shot.
Yo It allows the service providers to be the ultimate arbiters of how data is transmitted to and from the phones ... Everyone else is apparently fine paying the disproportionately large transmission fees for picture and text messages.
a little over a year ago i went out of my way to buy a bluetooth enabled phone. i never used it once. when i couldn't stand using that lemon of a phone (sony ericsson t616) any longer i got a new samsung. no bluetooth. no camera. no infrared.
and you know what? i don't pay a cent for picture or text messages.
Somehow, Extremium and Extremon don't seem to have the same rhyme.
I think it's supposed to be 'Extremeron'.
I wouldn't say that people look down on redhat for asking for money, so much as they like having an alternative when the money isn't necessary.
for example, i worked with a company who was looking to deploy their servers on a new platform. The initial development was done on FreeBSD, but we were looking at using Red Hat Enterprise Linux when the time finally came for full scale deployment. We had no problem with paying for the Red Hat Enterprise subscription on our production servers, but we wanted to be able to test the software on Red Hat before committing to the subscription. We set up a testing server with White Box Linux to verify compatibility before making the subscription commitment. Our development systems and backup servers continued to run White Box Linux after the deployment as well, as we did not see the value of paying a RedHat Subscription on those machines.
Also, a lot of people have criticixed Red Hat for not having a reasonable licensing structure for educational institutions, cluster setups, etc. After all, White Box Linux was written for a library when it was determined that the cost of an enterprise subscription for all of their servers would have been greater than the value of their hardware.
The man in black?
Yes, his CRM system is about to be deployed on a MySQL database. Who else has cause for ultimate suffering?
this one could actually be funny if it came from someone remotely associated with microsoft- an employee blog or something. or maybe 'leaked' by one of microsoft's partners. but not when it comes from some random editorial journalist.
and now the truth comes out.... i knew it was too good to be true that the mysql developers were backtracking on ten years of defending their design decisions- now we know that all of this talk about triggers, stored procedures, etc. was just the leadup to an elaborate april fools prank. clever...
Apparently not....
No. It's April 1st. It's Slashdot. This has been a regular occurence since the beginning of Slashdot.
Not exactly. Long ago, back even before there were user accounts on slashdot, most of the news on April Fools day was normal news, with a few barely plausible fictional articles mixed in. They usually tried to make sure that they included a few barely plausible real stories as well, to really mix things up. It made April Fool's day interesting, because you actually had to stop and think about whether each article was true or not. Of course, for the last few years, the 'Fools' articles are so ridiculous, and the real articles so mundane, that it's become pretty lame.
Just another sign that Taco et al have gone from doing something they really love to doing the least amount of work possible to make a living.
as opposed to now, where there is a nice convenient button for users to push to delete all of the sensitive data they store on their computer before they sell it?
oh wait, there isn't.... it's not like nobody has ever stored personal information on their computer before now, you know.
So, are they just going to pretend that 10 years worth of flaming on message boards, mailing lists, etc. about how you don't really want those features in your rdbms because you can just implement them in application code without slowing down the database never actually happened?
not like there aren't plenty of other excuses to go to vegas. this year, i'm going to my wife to the aia convention in las vegas (aia == american institute of architects, not to be confused with aa, even if it is hard to tell the difference sometimes.)
i'd rather go to an architect's convention than a computer one anyway.
actually the MIT team had $11,000. The $5,000 was just from one company (Exxon).
Memorize three "good" passwords (as in, more-or-less indistinguishable from a string of random characters). Use one for public purposes (ie, normal websites), one for normal moderate security use (normal user accounts at work and home), and reserve the last one for root/admin accounts and online financial sites.
This is more or less what i (used to) do, with one exception. i would never use a password that is used for a shell account on one of my machines for anything over the web, especially given some of the stupid things i've seen banks do with the passwords i provide.
my suggestion would be something like this:
1) websites that don't deal with any finanical information (/., download sites that require a login, newspapers that require registration, etc.)
2) websites that do deal with financial information (bank, credit cards, paypal, etc.
3) webmail accounts
4) user level shell accounts
5) admin level shell accounts
it requires you to remember a little more, but it improves separation substantially. also, for most casual computer users levels 4 and 5 may not be an issue anyway whcih brings the required number of base passwords down.
recently though, i've had to start diversifying passwords. level 1 is still the same as it was, but level 2 has gotten split into a few different passwords after i got married and my wife started dealing with the checking accounts and uch, and in levels 3-5 pretty much everything gets it's own password these days because i have email accounts and shell accounts on computers owned by multiple different companies, so it seems prudent to me to keep different passwords for them.
"Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
Even if the program assumes that "gates" is a plural common noun, and not a singular proper noun, shouldn't a remotely decent grammar checker still find fault with this sentence (beyond it's nonsensical nature)? Along with accidentally repeated double words, mixing singular and plural nouns/verbs is one lf the only things that the grammar check seems to actually be good for.
It seems like a halfway decent grammar checker in this case would at least recommend "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft"
i have to agree with you. i just finished installing suse professional on a dual 500MHz machine with a rage 128 and everything works great. and i still use FreeBSD+Gnome 2.? on my dual ppro 200 with a mach 64 relatively often as well. the ppro is a bit sluggish, but still usable for most tasks. unfortunately new memory for that system (which i think is all it really needs) is way too expensive to be worthwile and the main scsi disk is starting to make funny noises.
if you rtfa, i suspect the system you are describing as actually faster than the one in the videos. it doesn't specifiaclly mention processor speed, but it does say that the graphics cards are an intel i830, and an ati 7500 mobility. i think that my old 800 MHz Dell had about the same level of graphics hardware as these laptops, so i would doubt they are much faster than that. eyecandy doesn't have to mean slow- in fact if you are using some of the very basic and mostly unused 3d acceleration features of even 5 year old video cards, you could make a desktop that much snappier than most current systems.
also, transparency can have it's uses. while i wouldn't want transparent windows, i think that semi transparent dialog boxes could be useful if done right.
all it does is download the installer for the new version. how is that an 'autoupdate'?
while i don't remember ever having a maxtor drive go bad on me, i still doubt i would ever buy another one. from my personal experience, i'd agree that there isn't one brand of drive that is more or less reliable than any other (except maybe western digital on the bad side, but that may be just margin of error)
however, there are a lot of other factors to consider when buying hard drives. the last few maxtors i bought all sounded like shaking a can full of nails when they were seeking. lately, i only buy seagate drives. they seem to be at least as reliable as anything else out there, if not more so, and they are by far the quietest drives on the market.
some of us don't think $1 per song is that cheap. in fact it's more expensive than many cd's if you actually do want the whole thing. give it to me for a quarter or two per song (preferably lossless, or at least let me choose the bitrate) and i'll think about it again. i don't even really care about drm that much, as long as i can choose what player i want to play the music in- most of my existing library is in OGG format, which isn't supported in iTunes.
while becoming sufficiently famous to trade on my name to make loads of money elsewhere
not likely, because the music industry will own your name and pretty much everything you do after you sign a contract with them for as long as the contract is in effect. and most times the contract is in effect for as long as they want it to be, because it specifies a certain number of releases, and they get to decide what constitutes a release. they can make millions off the first three albums in a four album contract, and then sit on your fourth one for years just to keep you from jumping ship.
Best of all, some of those fees are flat, one-time payouts, so my take of the next million would be significantly higher.
assuming that there is a next million. remember above where the studio decides what you get to release and what you don't. you're also assuming that there won't be any new "one-time payouts"...
It looks to me like a lot of #1 and a little bit of #3. The pictures are definitely poor quality, you can tell from looking at the other (non-laptop) objects, people, etc. in the shots- bad focus and worse lighting. You can tell from the shots around the PCMCIA slots that the case is certainly not perfect, but overall, the pictures make it hard to tell just how good (or poor) the case really is.
And the 10% who run opera/mozilla are the ones who usually run ad blocking software, so you can fuck them anyway without any real loss in revenue.
while this logic is flawed in so many ways it's no funny, i'll only point out the obvious: this only applies if your revenue comes entirely from ads, which is very often not the case. (think online banking, ebay, any online store, online stock brokers, any site where you pay for a subscription to get access, any site such as msdn where the website exists to support an external source of revenue...)