I'd personally say that giving him 1% of the total outstanding shares would be fair. That's worth about $50M today... Quite a lot compared to the $84M they raised on the IPO.
> and now they're freeing a huge, important > chunk of code that is desperately needed > and would be a massive development effort > to start from scratch!
At 7000 lines of code, it may be huge, but it certainly isn't a "huge part". It represents about 7% of the code. There is a total of about 100k lines. 13 times more to come....
It isn't the easiest code to read. I like code with funny comments. This looks as if the PHB types got to read the code regularly. Humor is important. Not much of that in this code.
Oh well.....
-- Roger.
(computer needs vacuuming again: my X server just crashed;-( )
> It simply does not require evolution to be > a state assessment test subject. > Schools are NOT required to follow this and > may teach the subject any way they wish.
Schools are on budget cuts 99% of the time. They are usually pretty quick to drop any and all subjects they can to try to increase their "output" (students score reasonable on the finals) or reduce their costs.
> What kind of design process do the successful free-software projects > have (Linux, gcc, Apache, XFree86, etc)?
None, I think.
> In your experience, how often are design documents revisited after > the project?
Less than what they should.
> Have design documents helped in technology transfers (that is, have > they been more helpful than the source code alone)?
Yes.
> Are engineers good at writing design documents?
No.
> Have you been able to read design documents written by other > engineers?
Yes.
> Have old design documents been kept up to date with the changes in > the implementation?
Yes.
> Has the quality of your products been better because of design > documentation?"
Yes.
I think that I learned this "the hard way". At my first programming job there was a "software supervisor" who forced all the software-writing employees to submit design documents. Everybody agreed that he was a pain in the ass. But everyone did his duties. Design submitted, talked over with the guy, and software written. 3 weeks, and that includes designing and building the hardware, and learning the processor involved (8051).
Next they assigned me to a new project, in a different building. So that software supervisor wasn't there to bug me. That project was about of the same complexity, but it became a mess. Simply because we didn't have a design document, we started adding features along the road.
I think it pays to spend say 10% of the estimated development time with your feet in the air thinking about the problem that is to be solved. To give the bosses something tangible, you should write something down in your design document.
Oh, another trap to watch out for: I've been reading some the specs for the binary format for Excel sheets. Those are really well designed. The specs that is. The actual implementation of what Excel writes into a spreadsheet file is complete rubbish. So they have a "design team" which did a reasonable job at designing the file format and it turned out to be unusable for the guys actually implementing the thing.
So you should not have a "design team" and then an "implementation team". The implementors need a say in the design. Officially there is a bell-curve in the number of developpers involved with a project. If your project is small enough (say around 5 programmers), start the design process with all programmers involved. Possibly you'll send half the crew back to what they were doing during the next phase (say if you have around 10 programmers), but have them in on the design.
If the project is even larger, you may have to design the project with a small team, but then you should have a catching up session with the new programmers once they get involved.
This IPO gives out about $60M in stock. It gives out about 10% of the total stock. From this we can deduce that Red Hat is supposed to be worth about $600M.
My previous estimates for what Red Hat would be worth came to an amount of about $20M - $60M for the whole company.
So my opinion is that the stock is highly overrated.
Now the stock value can reflect an "expectation" value, and if the "doubling every year" (which they claim on their website) continues, any price is reasonable on the long run.
Anyway, I don't deal at stock markets. I don't buy stock. I just calculate total-company-value for fun. Just ignore me.
> What are the laws regarding reverse engineering, > specifically reverse engineering a piece > of software that has a specific clause in > it's usage license not to reverse engineer or > dissasemble the code?
IANAL.
In Europe, the law explicitly overrides those agreements, and states that you CAN reverse engineer to make a compatible product.
That is clearly the case here.
But I don't know where the reverse engineering was done.
Some 10 years ago, some engineers from Eindhoven demo-ed a trackball with force-feedback here in Delft.
The roller-detector wheels are normally very light. These guys had a whole motor attached to that. This means that the ball would move unacceptably heavy. So once you have that motor attached, you can use feedback to make it move with any resistance you care to simulate. Even negative resistance: nudge the ball, and it starts spinning faster and faster...;-)
Anyway, they simulated that you had to push the ball up a small hill when you passed a window-border or moved from one menu-entry to another. It didn't feel as something I've always wanted.
I remember performance-measuring on my first drive. About 100k per second. The PC probably contributed to that number: It did 3600 RPM, 17 sectors per track, 0.5k per sector, 60 seconds per minute: 510kbyte per second.
My new Quantum does 15Mb per second. That's a factor of 30. Moore's law predicts a factor of 30 every 10 years. (= A factor of 1000 every 20 years, = a factor of 5 every 5 years).
How long ago did I have my first hard drive? '87: 12 years go.
I'd say that harddisks follow Moore's law pretty closely.
Indeed, processors seem to have outperformed moore's law a bit the last decennium, so indeed the gap has increased a bit. (Oh well a factor of 20...:-)
Does anybody remember those PC indexes that measured how much your PC outperformed a 4.77Mhz IBM PC? What would a Celeron/400 score now? Is that realistic?
Of course, this test doesn't show reliability though.. how long could they each handle those loads? Just the (what hour?) time it took to run the test or 24x7 for 6 months....
I'm pretty confident that NT can run the benchmarks for 6 months in a row. The thing is, that in real life, more is going on. The machine will do a backup every now and then. Someone will insert a floppy and try to read it.
Even the timing between requests will vary a bit more than under the benchmarks.
Running the test for more than a few hours is only going to catch the systematic memory leaks. I should hope that Microsoft has those fixed by now.
It's moot anyway for the moment, since under the GPL they don't have to distribute a single line of source to anyone unless and until they distribute something with GPLed binary or object code.
Hmm. Suppose they never ship a binary. So when the customer recieves the box, you hit "install", and it says "Please wait", crunch, crunch "Done!". In the "crunch crunch" it compiled the modified GLP-ed components....
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
I think I'm getting more and more depressed. I just realized that I'm a clone of half my father and half of my mother. I'm not complete. Just half of each.
I suggest that we contact all the ISPs in the UK and notify them of the libellous information that they have on their OWN homepage, or the homepages of the companies for which they provide bandwidth.
They are now required to remove that information without a chance to protest the fact that the statement is true or not.
My guess is that this will get a point across.;-)
Regards,
Roger Wolff.
------------sample letter follows----------------- Dear ISP,
As of today, I consider your homepage (http://www.ISP.co.uk/) slander against my person. I therefore request you to take the appropriate action: remove that page from your homepage.
I would find it acceptable if you would replace the page with:
"We've been informed that our homepage contains slanderous material, and requested to remove that information from our homepage. Due to the recent court decision, we have to comply with this request, without questioning its validity.
Please help us get this stupid situation reversed. [URL to page explaining possible actions that UK residents can use to help the new law]
> I believe that artificial intelligence is > defined as "technology required to perform > impossible computing tasks"
I think that AI is commonly defined using Alan Turing's definition (late fourties). AI is when you can no longer reliably determine that a talk session is with the computer AI or a real human. (Transposed into modern terminology).
This is definitively not an AI: it just has a set of objectives, and attempts to achieve them knowing that it has reduced abilities. (Or by power cycling the subsystem to see if it comes back to life).
If you analyse the log, you can see that it takes RAX over an hour to deduce that it can operate the craft with the missing attitude jet.
One of the things to keep in mind is that you're never going to get more out of this (1 CPU, 1 NET card) configuration than the mindcraft NT performance figures: The peak NT performance was above 100mbps.
Some people are suggesting to use squid to direct requests to apache for the complicated stuff, and to thpptd for the simple stuff. I personally would try to make a tool that would change all local URLs to include the portnumber for all references that are a simple file. This might not be allowed for the benchmark, but it sure would help in the real world.
> There should be a way to allow the a-dvd > master to pick their own trade-off between > length and quality... 48 or 96 KHz sampling, > 16 or 24 bit
If I remember correctly, that is exactly what DVD-audio is about. And a few more.
And IIRC, they simplified things by not requiring audio players to be able to decode MP3 streams.
Personally I'd have required an MP3 decoder in the player: For the cases where you do want 100 hours of stuff on one disk, you can do it.
Designing a good format is all about expecting the unexpected. Sure, not every content-provider will have around 100 hours of audio to put on a disk, but it sure would be nice for say an archive copy of a trial.
(5.2G gives 100 hours of 115kbps MP3. Double-track gives a little under 200 hours. Reducing the bitrate can dramatically increase the capacity for stuff like voice-only.)
Whatever happens, Shannons theory DOES apply. Especially if it isn't ones and zeroes going about.
Sure, the bandwidth is pretty hard to calculate.
The bandwidth of a nerve is on the order of 1 bit per millisecond. This is comparable to the 2400 baud on a phone line: that's what you can naturally transfer over the medium without using expensive tricks.
By sending a pulse between 1 and 2 ms after the last one, and coding 10 bits in the exact position of the pulse you'll be able to get about 5 times as much data transferred. That's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd personally say that giving him 1% of the total outstanding shares would be fair. That's worth about $50M today... Quite a lot compared to the $84M they raised on the IPO.
-- Roger.
On the second day of trading prices have shot up again! They (Robert Young and Marc Ewing) both own over 600M in stock now......
Roger.
> and now they're freeing a huge, important
;-( )
> chunk of code that is desperately needed
> and would be a massive development effort
> to start from scratch!
At 7000 lines of code, it may be huge, but it certainly isn't a "huge part". It represents about 7% of the code. There is a total of about 100k lines. 13 times more to come....
It isn't the easiest code to read. I like code with funny comments. This looks as if the PHB types got to read the code regularly. Humor is important. Not much of that in this code.
Oh well.....
-- Roger.
(computer needs vacuuming again: my X server just crashed
> It simply does not require evolution to be
> a state assessment test subject.
> Schools are NOT required to follow this and
> may teach the subject any way they wish.
Schools are on budget cuts 99% of the time. They are usually pretty quick to drop any and all subjects they can to try to increase their "output" (students score reasonable on the finals) or reduce their costs.
Roger.
Questions:
> What kind of design process do the successful free-software projects
> have (Linux, gcc, Apache, XFree86, etc)?
None, I think.
> In your experience, how often are design documents revisited after
> the project?
Less than what they should.
> Have design documents helped in technology transfers (that is, have
> they been more helpful than the source code alone)?
Yes.
> Are engineers good at writing design documents?
No.
> Have you been able to read design documents written by other
> engineers?
Yes.
> Have old design documents been kept up to date with the changes in
> the implementation?
Yes.
> Has the quality of your products been better because of design
> documentation?"
Yes.
I think that I learned this "the hard way". At my first programming
job there was a "software supervisor" who forced all the
software-writing employees to submit design documents. Everybody
agreed that he was a pain in the ass. But everyone did his
duties. Design submitted, talked over with the guy, and software
written. 3 weeks, and that includes designing and building the
hardware, and learning the processor involved (8051).
Next they assigned me to a new project, in a different building. So
that software supervisor wasn't there to bug me. That project was
about of the same complexity, but it became a mess. Simply because we
didn't have a design document, we started adding features along the
road.
I think it pays to spend say 10% of the estimated development time
with your feet in the air thinking about the problem that is to be
solved. To give the bosses something tangible, you should write
something down in your design document.
Oh, another trap to watch out for: I've been reading some the specs
for the binary format for Excel sheets. Those are really well
designed. The specs that is. The actual implementation of what Excel
writes into a spreadsheet file is complete rubbish. So they have a
"design team" which did a reasonable job at designing the file format
and it turned out to be unusable for the guys actually implementing
the thing.
So you should not have a "design team" and then an "implementation
team". The implementors need a say in the design. Officially there is
a bell-curve in the number of developpers involved with a project. If
your project is small enough (say around 5 programmers), start the
design process with all programmers involved. Possibly you'll send
half the crew back to what they were doing during the next phase (say
if you have around 10 programmers), but have them in on the design.
If the project is even larger, you may have to design the project with
a small team, but then you should have a catching up session with the
new programmers once they get involved.
-- Roger.
> Ken Thompson modified the C compiler to
> recognize when it was compiling login -
> it added a trojan.
As far as I know this was talked about in a paper published in the early to mid eighties.
I'm not sure wether the actual code was written. It may not have been published back then, but only released recently.
Roger.
This IPO gives out about $60M in stock. It gives out about 10% of the total stock. From this we can deduce that Red Hat is supposed to be worth about $600M.
My previous estimates for what Red Hat would be worth came to an amount of about $20M - $60M for the whole company.
So my opinion is that the stock is highly overrated.
Now the stock value can reflect an "expectation" value, and if the "doubling every year" (which they claim on their website) continues, any price is reasonable on the long run.
Anyway, I don't deal at stock markets. I don't buy stock. I just calculate total-company-value for fun. Just ignore me.
Roger.
> What are the laws regarding reverse engineering,
> specifically reverse engineering a piece
> of software that has a specific clause in
> it's usage license not to reverse engineer or
> dissasemble the code?
IANAL.
In Europe, the law explicitly overrides those agreements, and states that you CAN reverse engineer to make a compatible product.
That is clearly the case here.
But I don't know where the reverse engineering was done.
-- REW.
Some 10 years ago, some engineers from Eindhoven demo-ed a trackball with force-feedback here in Delft.
;-)
The roller-detector wheels are normally very light. These guys had a whole motor attached to that. This means that the ball would move unacceptably heavy. So once you have that motor attached, you can use feedback to make it move with any resistance you care to simulate. Even negative resistance: nudge the ball, and it starts spinning faster and faster...
Anyway, they simulated that you had to push the ball up a small hill when you passed a window-border or moved from one menu-entry to another. It didn't feel as something I've always wanted.
Roger.
I remember performance-measuring on my first drive. About 100k per second. The PC probably contributed to that number: It did 3600 RPM, 17 sectors per track, 0.5k per sector, 60 seconds per minute: 510kbyte per second.
:-)
My new Quantum does 15Mb per second. That's a factor of 30. Moore's law predicts a factor of 30 every 10 years. (= A factor of 1000 every 20 years, = a factor of 5 every 5 years).
How long ago did I have my first hard drive? '87: 12 years go.
I'd say that harddisks follow Moore's law pretty closely.
Indeed, processors seem to have outperformed moore's law a bit the last decennium, so indeed the gap has increased a bit. (Oh well a factor of 20...
Does anybody remember those PC indexes that measured how much your PC outperformed a 4.77Mhz IBM PC? What would a Celeron/400 score now?
Is that realistic?
Roger.
I'm pretty confident that NT can run the benchmarks for 6 months in a row. The thing is, that in real life, more is going on. The machine will do a backup every now and then. Someone will insert a floppy and try to read it.
Even the timing between requests will vary a bit more than under the benchmarks.
Running the test for more than a few hours is only going to catch the systematic memory leaks. I should hope that Microsoft has those fixed by now.
Roger.
Hmm. Suppose they never ship a binary. So when the customer recieves the box, you hit "install", and it says "Please wait", crunch, crunch "Done!". In the "crunch crunch" it compiled the modified GLP-ed components....
Roger.
> 3) Does it have a RAID driver yet?
Shouldn't that be: RAIB ? Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Brains?
-- REW
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
I think I'm getting more and more depressed. I just realized that I'm a clone of half my father and half of my mother. I'm not complete. Just half of each.
I'm going to kill myself. Gotta go now....
I suggest that we contact all the ISPs in the UK and notify them of the libellous information that they have on their OWN homepage, or the homepages of the companies for which they provide bandwidth.
;-)
They are now required to remove that information without a chance to protest the fact that the statement is true or not.
My guess is that this will get a point across.
Regards,
Roger Wolff.
------------sample letter follows-----------------
Dear ISP,
As of today, I consider your homepage (http://www.ISP.co.uk/) slander against my person. I therefore request you to take the appropriate action: remove that page from your homepage.
I would find it acceptable if you would replace the page with:
"We've been informed that our homepage contains slanderous material, and requested to remove that information from our homepage. Due to the recent court decision, we have to comply with this request, without questioning its validity.
Please help us get this stupid situation reversed. [URL to page explaining possible actions that UK residents can use to help the new law]
Thank you.
ISP.
(for normal business, [to the old homepage])
"
J. R. Slashdot-reader.
> I believe that artificial intelligence is
> defined as "technology required to perform
> impossible computing tasks"
I think that AI is commonly defined using Alan Turing's definition (late fourties). AI is when you can no longer reliably determine that a talk session is with the computer AI or a real human. (Transposed into modern terminology).
This is definitively not an AI: it just has a set of objectives, and attempts to achieve them knowing that it has reduced abilities. (Or by power cycling the subsystem to see if it comes back to life).
If you analyse the log, you can see that it takes RAX over an hour to deduce that it can operate the craft with the missing attitude jet.
One of the things to keep in mind is that you're never going to get more out of this (1 CPU, 1 NET card) configuration than the mindcraft NT performance figures: The peak NT performance was above 100mbps.
Some people are suggesting to use squid to direct requests to apache for the complicated stuff, and to thpptd for the simple stuff. I personally would try to make a tool that would change all local URLs to include the portnumber for all references that are a simple file. This might not be allowed for the benchmark, but it sure would help in the real world.
Roger.
> There should be a way to allow the a-dvd
> master to pick their own trade-off between
> length and quality... 48 or 96 KHz sampling,
> 16 or 24 bit
If I remember correctly, that is exactly what DVD-audio is about. And a few more.
And IIRC, they simplified things by not requiring audio players to be able to decode MP3 streams.
Personally I'd have required an MP3 decoder in the player: For the cases where you do want 100 hours of stuff on one disk, you can do it.
Designing a good format is all about expecting the unexpected. Sure, not every content-provider will have around 100 hours of audio to put on a disk, but it sure would be nice for say an archive copy of a trial.
(5.2G gives 100 hours of 115kbps MP3. Double-track gives a little under 200 hours. Reducing the bitrate can dramatically increase the capacity for stuff like voice-only.)
Roger.
Whatever happens, Shannons theory DOES apply. Especially if it isn't ones and zeroes going about.
Sure, the bandwidth is pretty hard to calculate.
The bandwidth of a nerve is on the order of 1 bit per millisecond. This is comparable to the 2400 baud on a phone line: that's what you can naturally transfer over the medium without using expensive tricks.
By sending a pulse between 1 and 2 ms after the last one, and coding 10 bits in the exact position of the pulse you'll be able to get about 5 times as much data transferred. That's about it.
Regards,
Roger.