Backporting has been a stability problem and a source of great debate in the community.
First. The kernel is pretty damn stable. The instability people talk about are usually extreme cases or performance that is less than optimal. I have yet to see a 2.4.8 or later kernel lock up or panic on my typical hardware and I've got 3 machines running 24x7. I don't count the first 7 cuts becuase I was doing development on them and going to great pains to track them and they collectively should have been maybe to of the last 2.3.99 releases.
Linux is large. There are hundreds of regular contributors as well as a number of companies doing stuff. 2.3 lasted way to long and so everybody wanted to get their stuff in to 2.4 because 2.6 could be 2 years away after 2.4 came out. That was a mistake. The kernel underwent a lot of change during 2.3.99 and people were still adding tons of stuff. There were bitter fights about what should go in and when. You hate to be SGI, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (I'm guessing that's the man hour cost) porting SGI and not make the cut and then wait 2 more years.
At the same time the releases need to be tempered. People say 2.0.40 is a bad sign because it needed 40 patches. We could be on kernel 4.2 now if we made the releases closer and that just creates more confusion in a lot of ways also. 2.4 took way too long and too much happened. 2.6 will be much better and the community needs to see that and get used to 6 to 9 to 18 months for a major release. Companies need to understand that and make their investments accordingly. It's difficult though because there are so many independant people developing stuff they are planning to get in and it all can't go to Linus when he says he's getting ready to lock it down.
I think if anything, maybe 2.7 should branch off before 2.6 is cut. Linux and the team and go through the big items and determine where and when and then make some timelines accordingly. You give people working on the bigger things a place to put their stuff. Then the final 2.5 releases shouldn't be as rushed.
The reply was (paraphrased) "We can store about 20 years of waste here, on-site, but it's the government's job to find a perminent solution."
Which kind of makes the point. Do you want the people who are producing the waste and sitting there waiting for something to happen protecting the waste from terrorists?
The nuclear industry and the government made some deals and it's the US government's problem. All do respect to the nuclear industry, they have had a remarkably safe history with only a handful of accidents (which is amazing, any way you look at it) but after 9/11 I think the stakes have been raised a little and one of the few things the US government can do fairly well is build a fortress, spend billions of dollars and man it with a ton of heavily armed 20 year old who will kill whomever they are told to.
We should blame the politicians but that doesn't really fix anything, does it? You can't undo what has been done.
It's all rhetoric right now anyways. What's the liklihood of a truck crashing? Pretty low but it's high enough, we've all seen semi trucks upside down at some point in our lives. So they spend some hugh amount of money coming up with the one true container for this crap, I'm guessing that at least several hundred million went in to the R&D on that. They are bullet proof, bomb proof, they've had trains crash in to them, they've shot javelin missles at them, and they weigh a couple tons so the local gangs or terrorist groups couldn't just drive up in a van a take one. Well that's not good enough, the actual waste will still pass with in miles of major cities; never mind the fact that it's all sitting there now.
There is a fault near Yucca mountain, how many places in the world aren't near faults or experience earth quakes from time to time? None? One? Plus the crap will be in those containers.
Yucca mountain is simply a consolidation place, it's not like it's just getting buried and walked away from, people will go down there regularly and inspect things and we could take it all out if we need to.
If nothing else, we should build a big warehouse somewhere and start putting the stuff there. I feel much safer with it consolidated and watched by a whole division of marines than spread out around the country being watched by rent-a-cops that the nuclear folks pay for.
I don't see how a stripped down window is worth anything to anybody unless there is some huge price differential. It's been that way for so long, there are a lot or people that rely on the stuff that comes with windows. I don't know of a lot of 3rd party disk defraggers anymore. There aren't a lot of 3rd party browsers. Is anyone really going to buy widows without the browser? And if they do are they not going to have in installed the first time they install office or something?
They should give them a structural change. Split up the apps and OS groups or make 3 exact copies of everything. Don't buy their crap that competition is bad which is essentially what they are saying, if anyone other than MS dictates the direction that windows takes, like market forces) then it's bad for everyody. That's crap.
As a raw fuel, there are very few things that come close to be competitors to oil. Solar is right out for most of our applications, nuclear might do it but has its own problems. What else is there? Legitimately? WHat can you put in a plane and fly from LA to NYC with? Sans oil, that trip doesn't happen, period.
Then factor in the value of power, I used to think it was a cruel trick that the oil seems to be under places that are run by the world's ass holes. Not so, the world's ass hole know how valuble the stuff is and how much power you can wield with it and they are willing to do more to take it. Note the nearly complete lack of democracy in the middle east... Aren't there a bunch of anti-semitic states that hate the one democratic state becuase it's Jewish? That's what muddles the equation. Until there is something that can really do what oil does, in terms of safty, ease of use, power output and cost then it becomes a purely economic problem and things like the military costs start to weigh in. At the same time the value of the power that those ass holes wield will drop so the military cost will likely drop as well.
There is a lost of brutal truth in capitalisms. You can add up all of the costs associated with oil but odds on, it's still cheaper, all together, than the alternatives are. It really just demonstrates what the real costs of energy are.
How is this structurally different than BeOS? The only difference I see is that one entity won't be in control of it all. It sounds like it is very similarly modeled after BeOS ony it has a real kernel under it.
They don't have a lot of interesting patents. I wouldn't worry about that so much. Maybe the samba guys should but for the most part they don't have IP, not compared to OS/2's parent.
There business model isn't "just enough" it's more of "all the power that MS has is going to be behind it" Stability isn't why people did win95 instead of OS/2. It was apps, it was drivers like you mentioned, and it was IBM's half assed effort to back it while MS made sure all their apps took advantage of win32. The UI wasn't "just enough" improved, it was radically improved and it's still the paradigm in play right now with KDE and GNOME copying aspects of it.
When OS/2 went down IBM was hacking on it, literally. It was being worked on by a skeleton crew and the things they were doing were hack jobs. MS on the other hand was presenting the customer and world with a clear vision of where they were going and they were putting all of their effort in to it. Why would I, as a consumer, ever buy into something that isn't even liked and supported by it's maker? I know, I spent thousands of dollars on OS/2 software and compilers and documentation. IBM's support of it was stark compared to what MS did with Windows, regardless of how good the technology was. (has technology ever been what makes the standards in the tech businesses? I don't think so, we wouldn't have x86 anymore or VHS, or serial ports..)
Their technology might have been just "good enough" but the support the company put behind it was stunning. Very rarely does a company rally behind it's products like MS does, so consistently and with so many products. I mean when I bought windows95 I also got office95 and it took advantage of it, they had compilers, I could build a simple GUI app for windows95 in minutes. It wasn't until Warp 4.0 was against the ropes that IBM had a serious version of Ami/Word Pro for it and it was still a piece of shit. IBM's compilers for OS/2 were never that great and they cost a ton for the small time that they actually supported them.
This is spot on. I don't think there is such a thing as age discrimination at that age. It simply doesn't make business sense, particularly if the rest of the organization is substantially older, they are going to need young blood at some point and they know it. Further, I have yet to meet a guy who has been working for 20 years and is in his 40's and doesn't have some desire to bring up his replacement, particularly those in management. When you're 20 you know how to avoid all the mistakes the senior guys before you made and when your 40 you know how to mold a young mind in to the stud you never quite were.
This guy has made mistakes and they are playing the game with him. A similar thing happened to me. I got stuck in a hole, they wouldn't let me out, I asked everybody including my boss' boss who told me that I had pissed off my boss and I'd have to figure that out and fix it before I could move on. I asked my boss and of course nothing was wrong. You become hyper aware of everything you do that is different and you slowly become a drone or worker bee like all the others; you probably end up fixing half a dozen "behaviors" in the process.
Something else that I've seen in this thread several times: older programmers who are seniors aren't usually poor ones. Poking at a design, pointing out flaws, etc.. serves no puprose other than to show that you are young and stupid. More often then not they will know the mistakes they made and rarer still will it be that they invite you to discuss them. I've never meet a good senior who was intimidated by a 20 year old punk, never. I've meet plenty who had taken dislikings to said punks but never intimidated by them. It's always easy to find flaws, it's much harder to fix them, and it's even harder still to implement a flawless design with business factored in. Very very rarely is it just about the code or is the design more important than making a few bucks selling it. I've been in this industry 12 years and I've never seen a flawed design that wasn't made flawed for a reason, and more than a couple times I've burned bridges and pissed people off by making issue of it. Now I'm to the point where I'm leading teams and doing things and schedules and management and marketing is all playing a role and we're going to make mistakes that will cost us and others down the road.
Re:If only Transmeta would release a different CPU
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Via One-ups Transmeta
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If it were possible, they would be doing it or already have it done. They aren't exactly selling millions of those chips and there are companies who want sparcs, powerpcs, arms, etc.. There is a fair amount of x86 specific in the hardware.
You know their stockholders are suing them? I've resported it several times here on the dot, there are at least 3 class actions against them for overselling their products. It's not really geek news for a company to be sued by their shareholders but in their case it's looking like at least one and possibly 2 of the suits might result in wins against TMTA.
Try this. Go to Pittsburgh and go in to a Wean Hall cluster or one of the men's dorms at CMU any time during the Christmas holiday seasons and then tell me what you think about this idea.
Those places can have the foulest BO stench you can imagine.
I'll tell you something else. There comes a time in a man's life when his space and the people who chooses to share company with start to matter in different ways. A better idea, I think, or at least a safer idea would be to encourage geeks to all buy houses in the same community and set up a wireless network or something. I still can think of better things to do with my time but atleast you'll have your own building and space.
We all know that the idea of MS tech support being best is a joke, compared to what IBM and some of the other companies do it's a joke. I'm not sure what it takes to get an MS developer on site but other companies will do that.
Depending on the task I could see ways to spin MS tech support as top notch though. There are some tasks MS products do very well and their organization is designed around supporting. For example if I was trying to make 5 computers talk to each other and share a printer attached to one of them and use a common disk attached to another one of them I could do it with Linux or Win2k in roughly the same time, but I'm fairly experienced with Linux. If I wasn't expert at either, I bet I could actually do it with win2k in a reasonable amount of time (say a day) and when I had problems I could read their help, go to their web site and I bet I could get it done without ever talking to anyone. I think it would be very difficult, even with the newest mandrake and other easier to install dists to do it if you were a fairly novice person. If they found the howtos they could probably figure it out but they aren't always displayed in an obvious location, even on Mandrake there isn't an icon on the desktop or a search feature for them, they are in the KDE docs menu though..
If I had to do that and I suffered with it, I might say MS had better tech support. Likewise, bye the 5 or 6th try at it, MS has made the networking install and configuration pretty good and they've put a fair amount of effort in to trouble shooting those issues before you even have to go to the web or pickup the phone. At that particular task, they may be the best in the world. At real tasks that require real support? Well that's a little different.
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First. The kernel is pretty damn stable. The instability people talk about are usually extreme cases or performance that is less than optimal. I have yet to see a 2.4.8 or later kernel lock up or panic on my typical hardware and I've got 3 machines running 24x7. I don't count the first 7 cuts becuase I was doing development on them and going to great pains to track them and they collectively should have been maybe to of the last 2.3.99 releases.
Linux is large. There are hundreds of regular contributors as well as a number of companies doing stuff. 2.3 lasted way to long and so everybody wanted to get their stuff in to 2.4 because 2.6 could be 2 years away after 2.4 came out. That was a mistake. The kernel underwent a lot of change during 2.3.99 and people were still adding tons of stuff. There were bitter fights about what should go in and when. You hate to be SGI, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (I'm guessing that's the man hour cost) porting SGI and not make the cut and then wait 2 more years.
At the same time the releases need to be tempered. People say 2.0.40 is a bad sign because it needed 40 patches. We could be on kernel 4.2 now if we made the releases closer and that just creates more confusion in a lot of ways also. 2.4 took way too long and too much happened. 2.6 will be much better and the community needs to see that and get used to 6 to 9 to 18 months for a major release. Companies need to understand that and make their investments accordingly. It's difficult though because there are so many independant people developing stuff they are planning to get in and it all can't go to Linus when he says he's getting ready to lock it down.
I think if anything, maybe 2.7 should branch off before 2.6 is cut. Linux and the team and go through the big items and determine where and when and then make some timelines accordingly. You give people working on the bigger things a place to put their stuff. Then the final 2.5 releases shouldn't be as rushed.
Which kind of makes the point. Do you want the people who are producing the waste and sitting there waiting for something to happen protecting the waste from terrorists?
The nuclear industry and the government made some deals and it's the US government's problem. All do respect to the nuclear industry, they have had a remarkably safe history with only a handful of accidents (which is amazing, any way you look at it) but after 9/11 I think the stakes have been raised a little and one of the few things the US government can do fairly well is build a fortress, spend billions of dollars and man it with a ton of heavily armed 20 year old who will kill whomever they are told to.
We should blame the politicians but that doesn't really fix anything, does it? You can't undo what has been done.
It's all rhetoric right now anyways. What's the liklihood of a truck crashing? Pretty low but it's high enough, we've all seen semi trucks upside down at some point in our lives. So they spend some hugh amount of money coming up with the one true container for this crap, I'm guessing that at least several hundred million went in to the R&D on that. They are bullet proof, bomb proof, they've had trains crash in to them, they've shot javelin missles at them, and they weigh a couple tons so the local gangs or terrorist groups couldn't just drive up in a van a take one. Well that's not good enough, the actual waste will still pass with in miles of major cities; never mind the fact that it's all sitting there now.
There is a fault near Yucca mountain, how many places in the world aren't near faults or experience earth quakes from time to time? None? One? Plus the crap will be in those containers. Yucca mountain is simply a consolidation place, it's not like it's just getting buried and walked away from, people will go down there regularly and inspect things and we could take it all out if we need to.
If nothing else, we should build a big warehouse somewhere and start putting the stuff there. I feel much safer with it consolidated and watched by a whole division of marines than spread out around the country being watched by rent-a-cops that the nuclear folks pay for.
They should give them a structural change. Split up the apps and OS groups or make 3 exact copies of everything. Don't buy their crap that competition is bad which is essentially what they are saying, if anyone other than MS dictates the direction that windows takes, like market forces) then it's bad for everyody. That's crap.
Then factor in the value of power, I used to think it was a cruel trick that the oil seems to be under places that are run by the world's ass holes. Not so, the world's ass hole know how valuble the stuff is and how much power you can wield with it and they are willing to do more to take it. Note the nearly complete lack of democracy in the middle east... Aren't there a bunch of anti-semitic states that hate the one democratic state becuase it's Jewish? That's what muddles the equation. Until there is something that can really do what oil does, in terms of safty, ease of use, power output and cost then it becomes a purely economic problem and things like the military costs start to weigh in. At the same time the value of the power that those ass holes wield will drop so the military cost will likely drop as well.
There is a lost of brutal truth in capitalisms. You can add up all of the costs associated with oil but odds on, it's still cheaper, all together, than the alternatives are. It really just demonstrates what the real costs of energy are.
How is this structurally different than BeOS? The only difference I see is that one entity won't be in control of it all. It sounds like it is very similarly modeled after BeOS ony it has a real kernel under it.
There business model isn't "just enough" it's more of "all the power that MS has is going to be behind it" Stability isn't why people did win95 instead of OS/2. It was apps, it was drivers like you mentioned, and it was IBM's half assed effort to back it while MS made sure all their apps took advantage of win32. The UI wasn't "just enough" improved, it was radically improved and it's still the paradigm in play right now with KDE and GNOME copying aspects of it.
When OS/2 went down IBM was hacking on it, literally. It was being worked on by a skeleton crew and the things they were doing were hack jobs. MS on the other hand was presenting the customer and world with a clear vision of where they were going and they were putting all of their effort in to it. Why would I, as a consumer, ever buy into something that isn't even liked and supported by it's maker? I know, I spent thousands of dollars on OS/2 software and compilers and documentation. IBM's support of it was stark compared to what MS did with Windows, regardless of how good the technology was. (has technology ever been what makes the standards in the tech businesses? I don't think so, we wouldn't have x86 anymore or VHS, or serial ports..)
Their technology might have been just "good enough" but the support the company put behind it was stunning. Very rarely does a company rally behind it's products like MS does, so consistently and with so many products. I mean when I bought windows95 I also got office95 and it took advantage of it, they had compilers, I could build a simple GUI app for windows95 in minutes. It wasn't until Warp 4.0 was against the ropes that IBM had a serious version of Ami/Word Pro for it and it was still a piece of shit. IBM's compilers for OS/2 were never that great and they cost a ton for the small time that they actually supported them.
This guy has made mistakes and they are playing the game with him. A similar thing happened to me. I got stuck in a hole, they wouldn't let me out, I asked everybody including my boss' boss who told me that I had pissed off my boss and I'd have to figure that out and fix it before I could move on. I asked my boss and of course nothing was wrong. You become hyper aware of everything you do that is different and you slowly become a drone or worker bee like all the others; you probably end up fixing half a dozen "behaviors" in the process.
Something else that I've seen in this thread several times: older programmers who are seniors aren't usually poor ones. Poking at a design, pointing out flaws, etc.. serves no puprose other than to show that you are young and stupid. More often then not they will know the mistakes they made and rarer still will it be that they invite you to discuss them. I've never meet a good senior who was intimidated by a 20 year old punk, never. I've meet plenty who had taken dislikings to said punks but never intimidated by them. It's always easy to find flaws, it's much harder to fix them, and it's even harder still to implement a flawless design with business factored in. Very very rarely is it just about the code or is the design more important than making a few bucks selling it. I've been in this industry 12 years and I've never seen a flawed design that wasn't made flawed for a reason, and more than a couple times I've burned bridges and pissed people off by making issue of it. Now I'm to the point where I'm leading teams and doing things and schedules and management and marketing is all playing a role and we're going to make mistakes that will cost us and others down the road.
You know their stockholders are suing them? I've resported it several times here on the dot, there are at least 3 class actions against them for overselling their products. It's not really geek news for a company to be sued by their shareholders but in their case it's looking like at least one and possibly 2 of the suits might result in wins against TMTA.
Those places can have the foulest BO stench you can imagine.
I'll tell you something else. There comes a time in a man's life when his space and the people who chooses to share company with start to matter in different ways. A better idea, I think, or at least a safer idea would be to encourage geeks to all buy houses in the same community and set up a wireless network or something. I still can think of better things to do with my time but atleast you'll have your own building and space.
Depending on the task I could see ways to spin MS tech support as top notch though. There are some tasks MS products do very well and their organization is designed around supporting. For example if I was trying to make 5 computers talk to each other and share a printer attached to one of them and use a common disk attached to another one of them I could do it with Linux or Win2k in roughly the same time, but I'm fairly experienced with Linux. If I wasn't expert at either, I bet I could actually do it with win2k in a reasonable amount of time (say a day) and when I had problems I could read their help, go to their web site and I bet I could get it done without ever talking to anyone. I think it would be very difficult, even with the newest mandrake and other easier to install dists to do it if you were a fairly novice person. If they found the howtos they could probably figure it out but they aren't always displayed in an obvious location, even on Mandrake there isn't an icon on the desktop or a search feature for them, they are in the KDE docs menu though..
If I had to do that and I suffered with it, I might say MS had better tech support. Likewise, bye the 5 or 6th try at it, MS has made the networking install and configuration pretty good and they've put a fair amount of effort in to trouble shooting those issues before you even have to go to the web or pickup the phone. At that particular task, they may be the best in the world. At real tasks that require real support? Well that's a little different.