I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software.
Honestly, that's part of the problem.
Enterprise developers are used to a very particular envelope. That involves putting up with a lot of large-company bullshit and unfriendly tools. People in other environments have different needs that are poorly served by Java. And actually enterprise people have those needs too; they're just used to suffering.
Take all of the C#-inspired improvements in Java 1.5, for example. Many of them are about programmer convenience and improved expressiveness, neither of which mattered much until C# was a threat. Or consider EJB 3.0. EJB sucked for years until Hibernate, an open-source project, came along and beat the snot out of it. EJB 3.0 is basically a straight import of Hibernate.
Or take Ruby on Rails: you can't write that in Java. Why? My theory is that in large companies, they'll let you go away for three months and build infrastructure. Plus, neither Sun nor an enterprise architecture group trusts programmers with the kind of heavy wizardry that Rails uses to make things happen. So again, Sun gets its ass kicked by an open-source project.
If they really open it up, perhaps Sun can harness some of that power. But I'd bet they won't do it properly; Java reeks of "cathedral" thinking, and that papa-knows-best mentality is hard to shake.
One of my favorite interview questions is "What would you change about Java?" I've never hired a Java programmer that didn't have some good answers for that. I'm sure I could name off the cuff 20 things, big and small, that I'd change tomorrow if I could.
The other main problem is Checked Exceptions [mindview.net],
It depends on what kind of software development you're doing. Well-designed checked exception declarations force you to consider sad-path cases while coding. For high-reliability software development, I absolutely want them.
On the other hand, for something quick and dirty, checked exceptions are mainly an annoyance. You just want to put in a high-level exception handler and throw up a generic message. Then maybe you go in and add some special case handling here and there.
I'd be happy if they were optional. Perhaps an @FastAndLoose declaration at the top of your main class?
Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license
on
Will Sun Open Source Java?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What changes and how would depend upon which license was chosen.
And equally on what community process is chosen.
I regularly look at the source for some Java library class and cover my face in horror. I'm sure I'd submit a patch a week just in code cleanup and adding unit tests -- if I thought they would ever accept anything. An open license is only the start.
Sorry to respond twice, but I just realized that your position is inconsistent.
if you and i started show where we yelled at each other, i would resent it if some loser came and told us we are hurting america.
If they're not doing a serious show and it's just about argument as entertainment, then what Jon Stewart did was perfectly appropriate. He out-argued and out-entertained them.
Of course, his comments only were powerful because Crossfire pretended to be a serious show, and he ripped that veil away. If they were really serious, they could have dealt with him seriously. If they were honestly just entertainment, they could have treated it as more entertainment. Instead, they were gobsmacked. And, later, canceled.
we do agree that by the end of crossfire's run it wasnt a serious news show. so why not just find something else?
I'd love to. But as long as the major players are content to lob softballs and sell it as serious political debate, I don't have a lot of choice. The pols get the airtime they want, so they have no incentive to actually sweat a little.
Even if I do switch, there's no reason not to call the Crossfire pundits on their hypocrisy. You'll note that when Jon Stewart tore them a new one, they never claimed, as you do, that they were an inside-the-beltway version of Jerry Springer. Instead, they tried to hold Jon Stewart, who runs a comedy show, to the higher standard of journalism, one they apparently subscribed to.
you want hard journalism, go find it.
I have tried reading every major newsweekly in America. the best I can find is a British publication, The Economist. It's swell, but for US news it just doesn't have the same pull that a major US publication or network would. I've completely given up on TV news; fiberglass insulation has higher nutritional value.
I want our journalists to fill their important democratic role of holding politicians' feet to the fire. If they're not doing that, the should give up the pretense of being journalists and become entertainers or stenographers. It's shameful that Stewart and Colbert, who pretend to be newsmen, do a better job of getting at the truth than the actual ones.
his is often true of CSPAN broadcasts but simply isn't true here. During the doppleganger Bushes, you could hear loud laughter.
As you were writing this, I was actually going back and watching the video again and comparing. I know I'm not supposed to say this on Slashdot, but you're right. I still think the audience was poorly miked, but Colbert definitely didn't get the yucks that the President and his impersonator did.
crossfire was not marketed as a hard news show, crossfire is a polical arguments show, with opinions, not journalism.
This is only partly true. Anybody can have opinions. But when you put a show on a news network with serious politicians, journalists, and writers running it, I think there's some obligation to make it a show with serious content. Crossfire is not and should not be Jerry Springer.
it should be apparent to everyone that if you are making decisions based on facts you heard from jackasses (including stewart) yelling at each other on crossfire, then the problem is yours, not theirs.
Those jackasses, as you call them, include a variety of senators, congressmen, ambassadors, and other political movers and shakers. Given that they are running the country, I want to hear what they have to say, and I want it in an environment where they will answer hard questions, not just spew talking points and stay "on message". European journalists still manage to do this; it's only here that hard questions have apparently become taboo.
Although Crossfire apparently used to be that kind of show, I think we both agree that by the end it wasn't. You think that's fine. John Stewart didn't, and I happen to agree. If you don't like that, then by all means wallow in your talking points. (Or Jerry Springer; I'm not sure which you're promoting here.) There's plenty of that out there.
I've seen enough live comic performances to know that if the guy is doing his job right (also known as "funny"), people are laughing.... which makes me suspicious of anyone claiming he was doing a great job with the audience when they aren't laughing, or worse, because they weren't laughing.
When you see a comic live, you're sitting in the audience, and their laughter makes you laugh more. (Seriously. I'm a big laugher and my comic friends would give me free tickets because I'd start the ball rolling.) When you see stand-up on TV, the audience is heavily mic'd for the same reason. CSPAN didn't do that, so the naive will think that Colbert bombed.
I watched it with a group of people and we enjoyed it quite a bit. Parts of the video were kinda slow, but generally when we weren't laughing we were hand-over-mouth with shock that he would say things so true. And that's how a roast should be, IMHO.
He got some huge laughs, but some got no reaction and I can only assume that either those in attendance were brain dead and didn't get it or offended by his frankness. Either way, he was dead on and hilarious.
As somebody else points out, the lack of mics in the audience makes audience reaction look much weaker than a normal comedy show. But even watching it with pals on the other side of the continent, we were cringing at some of the brilliantly too-close-for-comfort material.
Colbert skewered the press pretty strongly too. I'm thinking the news blackout has more to do with the mainstream media's own shame than any courtesy to the President.
To be fair to the press, it's a very hard thing to cover. And of course, press skills have atrophied over the years so that they just look for quotes from two "sides" so they can call it fair. Which sides do you pick here?
Frothing right-wingers (and frothing left-wingers) both immediately turned it into Colbert vs Bush. But as you point out, it was both broader and more nuanced than that. Combine that with the extra care required when the media writes about the media, and I can see that they decided on a quiet Sunday at home. But now that there's a huge public reaction, they'll go back and cover that. Much easier, much safer.
we are the ones who are responsible for educating ourselves!
This is true.
chewing out carlson just continues the idea that we are not to blame. [...] if anyone is "hurting america", it is stewart, for implying that any media source a responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want.
That's ridiculous. The Crossfire guys weren't presenting themselves as entertainers; they were allegedly trying to do a serious political show. However, Stewart's critique was that it was fake journalism, a hypocritical farce. I grant that consumers should eat Doritos responsibly, but that doesn't mean that Frito Lay can say that they fill your fruits and vegetables requirement.
Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.
Another reasonable option is a Wiki. Many of them give built-in version control and have full text search. For organizing the data, you can use multiple pages. E.g., one page for the overall breakdown, linked to pages for each regional block, and then pages for each subnet.
If you're reasonably regular with your formatting and naming, Wikis are also easy to use as sources for scripts.
Quick tip: having policies you make known are not enforced will not build morale. Some will follow it and resent those that don't. [...]firing someone for a password sharing is better for overall morale [...]
You're creating a false dichotomy. I'm not saying that one should create a bunch of policies and then ignore them. I'm saying one should ask employees to further big-picture goals rather than load them down with a zillion rules that may or may not make sense in all circumstances.
If they're sharing passwords, that either means they don't understand why it's bad or the system is set up poorly, forcing them to share passwords to get work done. The solution to the former is education; the latter, better systems. If you've got an employee that won't learn or fails to develop good judgement, by all means fire them.
I'd fire people for any intentional violation of corporate policy. [...] Being able to trust your employees leads to them being able to trust you (and yes, vice versa, I'm aware of that implication). This in turn creates an atmosphere with good employee morale.
Quick tip: telling people you will fire them for violations of policy, even when they are trivial or when they *should* violate the policy to serve a higher goal, is not the best way to build trust or morale.
Draconian enforcement only makes sense when the policies perfectly address every situation ever encountered. With policies that complex, nobody will remember them anyhow. Given the choice, I'll always take an employee with good judgement over one who's pefectly obedient.
Saying a phone line tech support manager is bad at her job because she can't do anything about an engineering 'feature' in under two days is impossibly naive.
This "I only will deal with a human" attitude is pointless. Better to demand that corporations fix their IVR systems [...]
On the contrary. When IVR systems suck less, I'll use them more. (There are a couple good ones that I actually use regularly.) But until then, the way I demand better IVR is bypassing them. So when you get asked why the IVR system isn't meeting goals, tell 'em that it's the sucky UI.
The first set of DRC modules will consume about 10 - 20 watts versus close to 80 watts for an Opteron chip.
People buying USD$5000 coprocessors, plus the cost of developing specialized code to use them, don't cut corners on the basis of their electric bill.
You're doing the math wrong. For decent colo space, I pay somewhere around $150 per rack-unit year and $120 per amp-year. If the coprocessor is really 10-20x faster for my workload, I don't just save the half-amp on one coprocessor; I get the savings on servers I don't need. Just in rack and power costs, one coprocessor would save at least $4k per year.
In other words, for its target audience, the $5k coprocessor would be more than paid for by the infrastructure savings alone. If you're the kind of company that is buying a few $5k coprocessors to replace $100k in servers, I hope you're thinking about your electricity bill, as it will be more than $25k over the lifespan of those machines.
I am a C developer for a large multinational corporation that likes to make money. When I need to fork(), I do not have the time to think of all the memory management invovled with fork(). [...] I am not going to do the optimization (because CPUs cost less than my wages). Also: optimization never happens anyways (or at least, not properly).
I'm puzzled by this. When I don't care much about optimizing, I write in high-level languages and enjoy the development speed boost they give me. When I'm doing something at a low level that's performance-critical, I write in C and try to become one with the kernel. Why would you spend a lot of time developing in C but then not bother to know what's going on with the kernel and not bother to optimize?
You shouldn't state this as an absolute, because it's not. You also need to give reasons WHY to use maildir. An example exception case: We had an application where thousands of very small emails needed to be delivered to a single mailbox every minute.
If you are using mail servers for something other than email, then advice about how to handle email would indeed not apply.
Your comment is sort of like saying the advice for safely handling uncooked poultry doesn't really apply to the test engineers using the chicken gun to shoot raw chickens into running jet engines. It's true, but you would hope they already know that the normal rules don't apply.
So, it always surprises me a little to hear people talk about man, info, apropos, whatis, etc. being bad. But I maybe Joel on Software was right that people are incapable of reading when they sit at a computer.
There are two important things to recognize here:
People are different. What works for some doesn't work for others.
People are hard to change.
I note that geeks are very literate types. We read vast amounts. We are energetic in seeking out more information. We are the type that likes puzzles, and can be relentless in pursusing them.
Given that, it shouldn't be any surprise that the 95% of the population who are less literate than us have trouble using documentation that work well for us. It's like a bunch marathon runners being surprised their geeky couch potato friend can't keep up on what seems to them a mild mountain hike.
If we want people to use Linux, we need to make something tailored not just for us, but for them.
As a country, we prove ourselves irrationally xenophobic again and again. From the Dubai Ports World deal to people not buying laptops because they're "Chinese."
It's not xenophobia (or more specifically, sinophobia) so much as the power of branding.
I type this on a Thinkpad bought just before the buyout. I went with it out of personal experience of older Thinkpads that were practically bulletproof, plus the knowledge that IBM had a brand to protect. They make a lot of money from high-end computers and absurdly expensive consulting and services. If the laptops were ever to become known as crappy, it would hurt perception of the place where they really make their money.
But Lenovo? Never heard of them. Will they have the same dedication to quality? Maybe. Do they have the same incentive to preserve the value of the brand? Not really. What do I know about Lenovo? Only that they're a Chinese company I've never heard of, trying to buy their way into the American market.
What does the "random Chinese manufacturer" brand say to me? Cheap but adequate disposable junk, the kind you buy at Walmart or Target. Which is fine for some things: I've got a $20 digital scale and a $50 DVD player that are both some random Chinese brand. If one breaks, I'll throw it and buy another. But for my laptop, which I expect to use so much I wear the letters off the keys? Fuck "cheap but adequate".
What people don't know is that not much has changed since Lenovo bought the right to produce Thinkpads.
Almost every merger I've seen begins with people saying that everything will be fine; nothing important will change. I'm sure it must have happened that way once or twice. Maybe it's really true for Lenovo, and in ten years I will happily buy another Thinkpad from them. But it will take them that long to earn my trust, just like it did for IBM and their Thinkpads.
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I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software.
Honestly, that's part of the problem.
Enterprise developers are used to a very particular envelope. That involves putting up with a lot of large-company bullshit and unfriendly tools. People in other environments have different needs that are poorly served by Java. And actually enterprise people have those needs too; they're just used to suffering.
Take all of the C#-inspired improvements in Java 1.5, for example. Many of them are about programmer convenience and improved expressiveness, neither of which mattered much until C# was a threat. Or consider EJB 3.0. EJB sucked for years until Hibernate, an open-source project, came along and beat the snot out of it. EJB 3.0 is basically a straight import of Hibernate.
Or take Ruby on Rails: you can't write that in Java. Why? My theory is that in large companies, they'll let you go away for three months and build infrastructure. Plus, neither Sun nor an enterprise architecture group trusts programmers with the kind of heavy wizardry that Rails uses to make things happen. So again, Sun gets its ass kicked by an open-source project.
If they really open it up, perhaps Sun can harness some of that power. But I'd bet they won't do it properly; Java reeks of "cathedral" thinking, and that papa-knows-best mentality is hard to shake.
No, what is lacking?
Are you serious?
One of my favorite interview questions is "What would you change about Java?" I've never hired a Java programmer that didn't have some good answers for that. I'm sure I could name off the cuff 20 things, big and small, that I'd change tomorrow if I could.
The other main problem is Checked Exceptions [mindview.net],
It depends on what kind of software development you're doing. Well-designed checked exception declarations force you to consider sad-path cases while coding. For high-reliability software development, I absolutely want them.
On the other hand, for something quick and dirty, checked exceptions are mainly an annoyance. You just want to put in a high-level exception handler and throw up a generic message. Then maybe you go in and add some special case handling here and there.
I'd be happy if they were optional. Perhaps an @FastAndLoose declaration at the top of your main class?
What changes and how would depend upon which license was chosen.
And equally on what community process is chosen.
I regularly look at the source for some Java library class and cover my face in horror. I'm sure I'd submit a patch a week just in code cleanup and adding unit tests -- if I thought they would ever accept anything. An open license is only the start.
Sorry to respond twice, but I just realized that your position is inconsistent.
if you and i started show where we yelled at each other, i would resent it if some loser came and told us we are hurting america.
If they're not doing a serious show and it's just about argument as entertainment, then what Jon Stewart did was perfectly appropriate. He out-argued and out-entertained them.
Of course, his comments only were powerful because Crossfire pretended to be a serious show, and he ripped that veil away. If they were really serious, they could have dealt with him seriously. If they were honestly just entertainment, they could have treated it as more entertainment. Instead, they were gobsmacked. And, later, canceled.
we do agree that by the end of crossfire's run it wasnt a serious news show. so why not just find something else?
I'd love to. But as long as the major players are content to lob softballs and sell it as serious political debate, I don't have a lot of choice. The pols get the airtime they want, so they have no incentive to actually sweat a little.
Even if I do switch, there's no reason not to call the Crossfire pundits on their hypocrisy. You'll note that when Jon Stewart tore them a new one, they never claimed, as you do, that they were an inside-the-beltway version of Jerry Springer. Instead, they tried to hold Jon Stewart, who runs a comedy show, to the higher standard of journalism, one they apparently subscribed to.
you want hard journalism, go find it.
I have tried reading every major newsweekly in America. the best I can find is a British publication, The Economist. It's swell, but for US news it just doesn't have the same pull that a major US publication or network would. I've completely given up on TV news; fiberglass insulation has higher nutritional value.
I want our journalists to fill their important democratic role of holding politicians' feet to the fire. If they're not doing that, the should give up the pretense of being journalists and become entertainers or stenographers. It's shameful that Stewart and Colbert, who pretend to be newsmen, do a better job of getting at the truth than the actual ones.
his is often true of CSPAN broadcasts but simply isn't true here. During the doppleganger Bushes, you could hear loud laughter.
As you were writing this, I was actually going back and watching the video again and comparing. I know I'm not supposed to say this on Slashdot, but you're right. I still think the audience was poorly miked, but Colbert definitely didn't get the yucks that the President and his impersonator did.
crossfire was not marketed as a hard news show, crossfire is a polical arguments show, with opinions, not journalism.
This is only partly true. Anybody can have opinions. But when you put a show on a news network with serious politicians, journalists, and writers running it, I think there's some obligation to make it a show with serious content. Crossfire is not and should not be Jerry Springer.
it should be apparent to everyone that if you are making decisions based on facts you heard from jackasses (including stewart) yelling at each other on crossfire, then the problem is yours, not theirs.
Those jackasses, as you call them, include a variety of senators, congressmen, ambassadors, and other political movers and shakers. Given that they are running the country, I want to hear what they have to say, and I want it in an environment where they will answer hard questions, not just spew talking points and stay "on message". European journalists still manage to do this; it's only here that hard questions have apparently become taboo.
Although Crossfire apparently used to be that kind of show, I think we both agree that by the end it wasn't. You think that's fine. John Stewart didn't, and I happen to agree. If you don't like that, then by all means wallow in your talking points. (Or Jerry Springer; I'm not sure which you're promoting here.) There's plenty of that out there.
I've seen enough live comic performances to know that if the guy is doing his job right (also known as "funny"), people are laughing.... which makes me suspicious of anyone claiming he was doing a great job with the audience when they aren't laughing, or worse, because they weren't laughing.
When you see a comic live, you're sitting in the audience, and their laughter makes you laugh more. (Seriously. I'm a big laugher and my comic friends would give me free tickets because I'd start the ball rolling.) When you see stand-up on TV, the audience is heavily mic'd for the same reason. CSPAN didn't do that, so the naive will think that Colbert bombed.
I watched it with a group of people and we enjoyed it quite a bit. Parts of the video were kinda slow, but generally when we weren't laughing we were hand-over-mouth with shock that he would say things so true. And that's how a roast should be, IMHO.
He got some huge laughs, but some got no reaction and I can only assume that either those in attendance were brain dead and didn't get it or offended by his frankness. Either way, he was dead on and hilarious.
As somebody else points out, the lack of mics in the audience makes audience reaction look much weaker than a normal comedy show. But even watching it with pals on the other side of the continent, we were cringing at some of the brilliantly too-close-for-comfort material.
Colbert skewered the press pretty strongly too. I'm thinking the news blackout has more to do with the mainstream media's own shame than any courtesy to the President.
To be fair to the press, it's a very hard thing to cover. And of course, press skills have atrophied over the years so that they just look for quotes from two "sides" so they can call it fair. Which sides do you pick here?
Frothing right-wingers (and frothing left-wingers) both immediately turned it into Colbert vs Bush. But as you point out, it was both broader and more nuanced than that. Combine that with the extra care required when the media writes about the media, and I can see that they decided on a quiet Sunday at home. But now that there's a huge public reaction, they'll go back and cover that. Much easier, much safer.
we are the ones who are responsible for educating ourselves!
This is true.
chewing out carlson just continues the idea that we are not to blame. [...] if anyone is "hurting america", it is stewart, for implying that any media source a responsibility to do anything other than report whatever they want.
That's ridiculous. The Crossfire guys weren't presenting themselves as entertainers; they were allegedly trying to do a serious political show. However, Stewart's critique was that it was fake journalism, a hypocritical farce. I grant that consumers should eat Doritos responsibly, but that doesn't mean that Frito Lay can say that they fill your fruits and vegetables requirement.
If it can't compute a result accurately, it should shut down rather than give a wrong answer.
Congress could learn a lot from this.
For those wondering: Jargon File and Wikipedia entries for HCF.
Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.
Another reasonable option is a Wiki. Many of them give built-in version control and have full text search. For organizing the data, you can use multiple pages. E.g., one page for the overall breakdown, linked to pages for each regional block, and then pages for each subnet.
If you're reasonably regular with your formatting and naming, Wikis are also easy to use as sources for scripts.
Quick tip: having policies you make known are not enforced will not build morale. Some will follow it and resent those that don't. [...]firing someone for a password sharing is better for overall morale [...]
You're creating a false dichotomy. I'm not saying that one should create a bunch of policies and then ignore them. I'm saying one should ask employees to further big-picture goals rather than load them down with a zillion rules that may or may not make sense in all circumstances.
If they're sharing passwords, that either means they don't understand why it's bad or the system is set up poorly, forcing them to share passwords to get work done. The solution to the former is education; the latter, better systems. If you've got an employee that won't learn or fails to develop good judgement, by all means fire them.
I'd fire people for any intentional violation of corporate policy. [...] Being able to trust your employees leads to them being able to trust you (and yes, vice versa, I'm aware of that implication). This in turn creates an atmosphere with good employee morale.
Quick tip: telling people you will fire them for violations of policy, even when they are trivial or when they *should* violate the policy to serve a higher goal, is not the best way to build trust or morale.
Draconian enforcement only makes sense when the policies perfectly address every situation ever encountered. With policies that complex, nobody will remember them anyhow. Given the choice, I'll always take an employee with good judgement over one who's pefectly obedient.
Saying a phone line tech support manager is bad at her job because she can't do anything about an engineering 'feature' in under two days is impossibly naive.
No, I assure you it's possible.
This "I only will deal with a human" attitude is pointless. Better to demand that corporations fix their IVR systems [...]
On the contrary. When IVR systems suck less, I'll use them more. (There are a couple good ones that I actually use regularly.) But until then, the way I demand better IVR is bypassing them. So when you get asked why the IVR system isn't meeting goals, tell 'em that it's the sucky UI.
You're doing the math wrong. For decent colo space, I pay somewhere around $150 per rack-unit year and $120 per amp-year. If the coprocessor is really 10-20x faster for my workload, I don't just save the half-amp on one coprocessor; I get the savings on servers I don't need. Just in rack and power costs, one coprocessor would save at least $4k per year.
In other words, for its target audience, the $5k coprocessor would be more than paid for by the infrastructure savings alone. If you're the kind of company that is buying a few $5k coprocessors to replace $100k in servers, I hope you're thinking about your electricity bill, as it will be more than $25k over the lifespan of those machines.
I am a C developer for a large multinational corporation that likes to make money. When I need to fork(), I do not have the time to think of all the memory management invovled with fork(). [...] I am not going to do the optimization (because CPUs cost less than my wages). Also: optimization never happens anyways (or at least, not properly).
I'm puzzled by this. When I don't care much about optimizing, I write in high-level languages and enjoy the development speed boost they give me. When I'm doing something at a low level that's performance-critical, I write in C and try to become one with the kernel. Why would you spend a lot of time developing in C but then not bother to know what's going on with the kernel and not bother to optimize?
You shouldn't state this as an absolute, because it's not. You also need to give reasons WHY to use maildir. An example exception case: We had an application where thousands of very small emails needed to be delivered to a single mailbox every minute.
If you are using mail servers for something other than email, then advice about how to handle email would indeed not apply.
Your comment is sort of like saying the advice for safely handling uncooked poultry doesn't really apply to the test engineers using the chicken gun to shoot raw chickens into running jet engines. It's true, but you would hope they already know that the normal rules don't apply.
There are two important things to recognize here:
I note that geeks are very literate types. We read vast amounts. We are energetic in seeking out more information. We are the type that likes puzzles, and can be relentless in pursusing them.
Given that, it shouldn't be any surprise that the 95% of the population who are less literate than us have trouble using documentation that work well for us. It's like a bunch marathon runners being surprised their geeky couch potato friend can't keep up on what seems to them a mild mountain hike.
If we want people to use Linux, we need to make something tailored not just for us, but for them.
As a country, we prove ourselves irrationally xenophobic again and again. From the Dubai Ports World deal to people not buying laptops because they're "Chinese."
It's not xenophobia (or more specifically, sinophobia) so much as the power of branding.
I type this on a Thinkpad bought just before the buyout. I went with it out of personal experience of older Thinkpads that were practically bulletproof, plus the knowledge that IBM had a brand to protect. They make a lot of money from high-end computers and absurdly expensive consulting and services. If the laptops were ever to become known as crappy, it would hurt perception of the place where they really make their money.
But Lenovo? Never heard of them. Will they have the same dedication to quality? Maybe. Do they have the same incentive to preserve the value of the brand? Not really. What do I know about Lenovo? Only that they're a Chinese company I've never heard of, trying to buy their way into the American market.
What does the "random Chinese manufacturer" brand say to me? Cheap but adequate disposable junk, the kind you buy at Walmart or Target. Which is fine for some things: I've got a $20 digital scale and a $50 DVD player that are both some random Chinese brand. If one breaks, I'll throw it and buy another. But for my laptop, which I expect to use so much I wear the letters off the keys? Fuck "cheap but adequate".
What people don't know is that not much has changed since Lenovo bought the right to produce Thinkpads.
Almost every merger I've seen begins with people saying that everything will be fine; nothing important will change. I'm sure it must have happened that way once or twice. Maybe it's really true for Lenovo, and in ten years I will happily buy another Thinkpad from them. But it will take them that long to earn my trust, just like it did for IBM and their Thinkpads.
How hard would it be to fork wikipedia?
Not only is it easy, but it has already happened. See the Wikipedia article on Wikinfo.