Sorry about that. I've found your patch in my mail archives (although I only see two copies of it, not five!). As far as I can tell, both times it turned up when I had so much mail to read that I simply didn't have time to read it all.
Delegation of work would be nice, but it's very difficult to find anyone competent to vet patches the same way we do, with full appreciation of issues such as portability. At the end of the day, the core PuTTY team need to personally check anything that goes into the code base, to prevent obvious security holes (although this isn't a great time to mention that, I know:-) and to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of the code. Even the very best patches I've received still need work before they're usable.
Your patches look mostly sensible. I'll respond in detail by email.
That's true, we didn't mention that anywhere, did we?
We were notified of the problem six days before the 0.55 release went out. I'd have liked to get it turned around faster than that, but it took me a few days of bouncing email back and forth to get a coherent description of one of the two problems (the less important one, as it turned out).
4 megabytes of data == 32 megabits == 2^25 bits. That doesn't mean there are 2^25 combinations of bits - it means there are 2^25 actual bits. The number of combinations is 2^(2^25), which is really quite a staggeringly large amount bigger.
Similarly, there are 2^(2^18) combinations in a 32K data block, not 2^18 as you suggest. So an even distribution would in fact mean that each 32K block expands to 2^(2^25-2^18) different 4 meg blocks - which means the amount of space it would take to store that number is (2^25-2^18) bits. Coincidentally, this is exactly the amount of space by which you reduced the piece of music in the first place!
"But hey, you're writing a compression algorithm - just use it."
You can't hide behind that, I'm afraid. At this stage you're trying to prove that a compression algorithm of this type is feasible to write. Unfortunately, in the course of your proof you've made the assumption that a compression algorithm of this type is feasible to write! So you've proved that if it can be done, then it can be done. Undeniably true, but not 100% helpful.
You will find that the number of possible expansions of your X/125 data string is much larger than will fit in the difference between X/125 and X/100. In fact, on average it will work out to be roughly what you can fit in the difference between X/125 and X. So you still haven't gained anything - you're still bound by the simple counting argument that says you can't uniformly reduce every length-X string into a sub-length-X string.
Quite the contrary: if they had claimed to be achieving 100:1 compression on truly random data, they would be provably talking total rubbish. Consider the number of possible bit strings of length N. Now consider the number of possible bit strings of length N/100. There are fewer of the latter, right? Therefore, if you can compress every length-N string into a length-N/100 string, at least two inputs must map to the same output. Hence, you can't uniquely recover the input from the output - and the compression cannot be lossless.
The fact that they hedge and talk about "practically" random sequences is the only thing that makes it possible they're telling the truth!
There have been many, *many* times where the solution is more viable through recreation than using existing code.
Certainly! If someone is going to gain more value from solving the same problem their own way - be it educational, or be it the advantage of having a complete understanding of their solution and being able to hack it at need, or maybe their needs are slightly different from mine - then by all means they should go ahead and do so rather than using my code! I'd never say otherwise. But that's not a reason not to put my own code up on the net. Even better than using my code, or than not using my code, is having the choice of whether or not to use my code.
Further, what if your code falls into hands you don't want it to. Surely, you don't want to give your code away to *everyone*. Terrorists? Government agents?
*shrug*. Selling the software doesn't prevent this happening either; terrorists can shop in software stores just like everybody else, and not only so can government agents, but they have access to bigger budgets than the rest of us anyway!
Obviously it would be nice if we could prevent terrorists getting their hands on as many good things as possible (not just software and guns: also mobile phones, chainsaws, duct tape, and even chocolate biscuits), but if we could do that we'd by definition be able to identify the terrorists in among the general population. And if we could do that, we could just send them to prison for terrorism, and stop needing to worry about whether they were getting their hands on stuff!
As long as terrorists remain indistinguishable from normal human beings, you cannot separate distributing stuff to normal human beings from distributing stuff to terrorists. The only way to avoid my software getting into the hands of terrorists is not to write it at all. I happen to think the benefit to the rest of humanity outweighs that.
... well, I suppose they're related reasons really. But anyway.
First reason: suppose I have a problem with a computer, which needs code written to solve it. Once I've written the code and solved my problem, it seems a little unfair to make everybody else have to write their own solution when there's already one here. So I give the solution freely to friends who ask for it - and it's only a small step from there to putting it on a website for everybody.
Second reason, which I suppose is implicit in the first: I get a kick out of feeling I've benefitted everybody. Not just those people who pay for my code, to the feeble extent the licence agreement permits them to benefit; but anyone with a web browser who wants to download useful stuff off me. By contrast, when I work at my day job I'm always conscious that I'm primarily working to benefit them, and that any benefit that comes to people outside the company is a necessary side effect and not the actual goal.
(Yes, I know I'm not benefitting absolutely everybody, because there are people who don't have computers, or don't want to do the same things as me with their computers, who have no need for the stuff I write. Doesn't bother me; what I like is the idea that anyone who wants my stuff can get it. It's not necessary for everyone in the world to want it. People who don't want it don't have to have it, and hey, that's cool too:-)
So one thing I'd like to know is, how can a non-AI-complete interface manage to be powerful and usable?
Currently, we have GUIs which are intuitively easy to use (unless you're my mum, who is virtually computer illiterate but much prefers CLIs) but provide relatively little power, and if you want to do a complex multi-stage operation you have to run through it step by step by hand. Then you get CLIs, which have massive scripting power and allow arbitrarily complex automated tasks, but which aren't the most obvious thing for the beginner. Hence the division into "beginner" and "expert" modes, which the review says Raskin thinks shouldn't exist.
The thing is, I can't imagine an interface that is 100% intuitive to use, without requiring the user to think about details of the interface, and simultaneously allows the sort of massive power you'd get from, say, putting together a five-command Unix pipeline that picks out all the lines that appear exactly twice in a text file. So if you aren't allowed separate beginner and expert modes, what can you possibly do?
The more I think about this, the more I think it has to be AI-complete, in fact; because the only way you can express a generic requirement like that to a non-AI computer is by programming. But that's precisely a process of concentrating on the details of the interface (language)! The only alternative to that is simply to describe to the computer what you want, and let it figure out how to get it - which requires AI. In other words, Raskin has to be advocating the HAL 9000 complete natural language interface. Intuitive, and powerful. Nothing else comes close.
The obvious alternative to a fixed category system is arbitrary search criteria.
"Computer, give me the document I was working on last week about Genghis Khan." "Computer? Didn't I once write something that compared Bill Gates to a hibernating wombat?"
... and so on. The computer can retrieve your document based on any criteria you like, not just the one (or, counting symlinks, the several) you happened to file it under.
He'll be moving on to help other companies produce implementations of the OpenPGP standard. Don't most companies' employment contracts include a provision that you agree not to go into business in direct competition for n years afterwards? And wouldn't a competing implementation of the OpenPGP standard count?
Perhaps he didn't have a contract like that; since he started PGP the company himself, he presumably didn't bother to write himself a daft contract then, and maybe NAI didn't impose one on him when they bought him...
The protocol is called SSH. Now it's obvious that people will want to name their applications after the protocols they implement. So: either Tatu should have named his app and his protocol differently, and trademarked the app name only; or he shouldn't have trademarked the name. If he'd trademarked the app name only, OpenSSH would have named itself after the protocol and there'd have been no problem.
Releasing a supposedly "open" protocol and then trademarking the name is an evil business practice, because it means that only Tatu is allowed to name his implementation in the obvious way. It's the trademark analogy of the GIF trick: releasing a supposedly "open" file format and then patenting the only known algorithm that can generate it.
In fact, this is exactly equivalent to the GIF trick, because he's waited until the OpenSSH name is well established before acting. If he'd had a polite word right when OpenSSH was starting out, they'd probably have released it under a different name initially and nobody would have a problem now. But by waiting until they're established and then complaining, he's trying to force the change of a name people are used to - which will do harm to OpenSSH.
If Tatu were genuinely concerned about brand recognition, he would have (a) arranged that the protocol name could be used without restriction, instead of deliberately making it the same as his brand name; and (b) he would have notified OpenSSH at a more appropriate time. Given that he's done neither of these, it seems to me that he's using this trademark as a weapon, not a legitimate form of protection.
(Disclaimer: this is a moral position, not a legal one. The law will probably not recognise arguments like this. If so, the law needs fixing.)
The country that helped invent the most technologically advanced information network in world history...
Excuse me? Surely the word "helped" suggests that more than one country was involved? So the wording should have been "One of the countries that helped...".
Look at this as either a small pedantry or a point about US-centrism, whichever you prefer. I'm not quite sure which it is myself.
I'm just wondering what would happen if we tried talking to Simon Tatham and Julian Hall and asking them for a license change.
I'd agree to it. Unhesitatingly. On all the parts of the NASM code that were written by me. And I'll be happy to send formal notice of that to anyone who wants it.
I always wanted to appear on Slashdot, but I never thought I'd do it by having years of my life slagged off in a front-page story. <kyle>You bastards!</kyle>
There's been a lot of dispute as to whether the intent of the GPL clause was to dual-license or to create a strange hybrid thing. I can answer that very simply: it was to dual-license.
We created the original NASM licence (which didn't even have the GPL clause) back in 1995 when understanding of the issues wasn't widespread like it is now. Nobody seemed to care that it wasn't GPL-compatible at the time - it was free enough for people's purposes.
After a while, Debian found NASM and packaged it up, and pointed out to us that it would have to go in "non-free" unless we were willing to dual-license with the GPL. We agreed to that, and I sent an email to the Debian package maintainer granting our permission for Debian to distribute their NASM package under the GPL, until such time as we got round to making it explicit in the real licence.
When we did make it explicit, we clearly didn't do it very well. But the intention has always been to dual-license.
Therefore, I don't see that there's a serious problem here, at least as far as intentions go. We wanted any user of NASM to have accepted (at least) one of the NASM half of the licence and the GPL. If you want to link NASM code with GPL code, you accept the GPL, and then you have no problem.
I downloaded the Minix sources and poked through them to see if I could find anything interesting or useful. One thing I'd have been particularly interested to see would have been the sources to the compiler. The world does not yet contain enough 8086-target compilers, for those maniacs who still don't think the range of available boot loaders is good enough.
I didn't find them. Anywhere. I found the compiler driver, the thing that invokes the various compiler passes in turn, but nothing else.
If they're intentionally not present, I'd have expected to see something in the FAQ or info pages saying so and saying why. Anyone know where they went?
(And I tried to compile Advent on the nearest Unix box. It seemed to work, but as soon as I typed "GET LAMP" it segfaulted. Arrgh!:-)
Something really bizarre happened to your URL there. You did of course Preview and check it before posting... ?:-)
In any case, I know it's easy to install an ssh client in your Workspot workspace, because it's just like doing it on any other Unix. What I wanted to know is whether the machines come with the ssh server installed - which a user can't do for themselves at all.
I know plenty of people who'd love to have a free Unix account like this. A lot of them wouldn't want to have to access it through these bizarre VNC clients. The web site seemed curiously silent on this, but I'd like to know if they support ssh logins. If they don't, there's something seriously missing.
I wonder what their load is like? (And whether it'll increase after being slashdotted...) Last time I heard of a free-Unix-account setup, it was ludicrously overloaded. If it's not worth logging in because you won't be able to do anything once you get there, why bother?
And where are they getting their money from, if the major service is free? I didn't even see any adverts on the site. How are they going to stay around?
Non-commercial users, as I understand it, must also use RSAREF and aren't allowed to go with faster, better alternatives.
If RSA had found this problem before anybody else, scanning commercial entities to see if they were using the non-commercial-only RSAREF is only the half of it. They could also have scanned non- commercial entities to see if they were using non-RSAREF libraries. Patent violations! Cease And Desist! Kill! Kill! Kill!
I get intensely irritated by these articles that tell me I'm not doing something in a way that implies it's bad.
Sure, I'm not "in touch" with the "Linux mainstream". I don't keep close track of which distribution is most popular, which distribution wins, what the latest commercial Linux-capable software releases are, and so on... because I don't care.
When I find myself nowhere near either a worthwhile net connection or a CD writer with a worthwhile net connection, I'll go out and take an interest in what boxed Linux distributions are available. Until then, it doesn't matter to me. Is this bad?
As I see it, there are only two problems with the fact that I'm "out of touch" in the sense that I don't use the same distribution as the fabled Linux Mainstream.
One of those is that if a member of the Mainstream asks me for help sorting out a problem, I might trip up once or twice when things aren't quite where I expect; big deal, I can never remember quite where everything is even on my own machine, and in any case members of the Mainstream have paid for tech support and don't need to ask me anyway surely?
And the other is that the software I write might accidentally make assumptions about the locations of files that then prevents it working cleanly on the Mainstream distributions. If I do this, I'm deeply stupid, whether I craft an accidental dependency on Geek Elite Technically Superior Linux(tm) or Mainstream Dumbed Down Point And Drool Linux(tm). It makes no difference except that in the latter case I'm less obviously stupid.
So why shouldn't I lose touch? I keep my mind on the important thing: actually doing useful stuff with my computer systems. This is a bad thing how?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about that. I've found your patch in my mail archives (although I only see two copies of it, not five!). As far as I can tell, both times it turned up when I had so much mail to read that I simply didn't have time to read it all.
:-) and to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of the code. Even the very best patches I've received still need work before they're usable.
Delegation of work would be nice, but it's very difficult to find anyone competent to vet patches the same way we do, with full appreciation of issues such as portability. At the end of the day, the core PuTTY team need to personally check anything that goes into the code base, to prevent obvious security holes (although this isn't a great time to mention that, I know
Your patches look mostly sensible. I'll respond in detail by email.
No, I tell a lie, sorry. The Core advisory does mention it: we were notified on 2004-07-28 and published a fix on 2004-08-03.
That's true, we didn't mention that anywhere, did we?
We were notified of the problem six days before the 0.55 release went out. I'd have liked to get it turned around faster than that, but it took me a few days of bouncing email back and forth to get a coherent description of one of the two problems (the less important one, as it turned out).
But of course you've only got my word for that...
So what's wrong with doing coroutines in C? :-)
Sorry, you've missed a "two to the power" out.
4 megabytes of data == 32 megabits == 2^25 bits. That doesn't mean there are 2^25 combinations of bits - it means there are 2^25 actual bits. The number of combinations is 2^(2^25), which is really quite a staggeringly large amount bigger.
Similarly, there are 2^(2^18) combinations in a 32K data block, not 2^18 as you suggest. So an even distribution would in fact mean that each 32K block expands to 2^(2^25-2^18) different 4 meg blocks - which means the amount of space it would take to store that number is (2^25-2^18) bits. Coincidentally, this is exactly the amount of space by which you reduced the piece of music in the first place!
"But hey, you're writing a compression algorithm - just use it."
You can't hide behind that, I'm afraid. At this stage you're trying to prove that a compression algorithm of this type is feasible to write. Unfortunately, in the course of your proof you've made the assumption that a compression algorithm of this type is feasible to write! So you've proved that if it can be done, then it can be done. Undeniably true, but not 100% helpful.
You will find that the number of possible expansions of your X/125 data string is much larger than will fit in the difference between X/125 and X/100. In fact, on average it will work out to be roughly what you can fit in the difference between X/125 and X. So you still haven't gained anything - you're still bound by the simple counting argument that says you can't uniformly reduce every length-X string into a sub-length-X string.
Quite the contrary: if they had claimed to be achieving 100:1 compression on truly random data, they would be provably talking total rubbish. Consider the number of possible bit strings of length N. Now consider the number of possible bit strings of length N/100. There are fewer of the latter, right? Therefore, if you can compress every length-N string into a length-N/100 string, at least two inputs must map to the same output. Hence, you can't uniquely recover the input from the output - and the compression cannot be lossless.
The fact that they hedge and talk about "practically" random sequences is the only thing that makes it possible they're telling the truth!
*shrug*. Selling the software doesn't prevent this happening either; terrorists can shop in software stores just like everybody else, and not only so can government agents, but they have access to bigger budgets than the rest of us anyway!
Obviously it would be nice if we could prevent terrorists getting their hands on as many good things as possible (not just software and guns: also mobile phones, chainsaws, duct tape, and even chocolate biscuits), but if we could do that we'd by definition be able to identify the terrorists in among the general population. And if we could do that, we could just send them to prison for terrorism, and stop needing to worry about whether they were getting their hands on stuff!
As long as terrorists remain indistinguishable from normal human beings, you cannot separate distributing stuff to normal human beings from distributing stuff to terrorists. The only way to avoid my software getting into the hands of terrorists is not to write it at all. I happen to think the benefit to the rest of humanity outweighs that.
... well, I suppose they're related reasons really. But anyway.
First reason: suppose I have a problem with a computer, which needs code written to solve it. Once I've written the code and solved my problem, it seems a little unfair to make everybody else have to write their own solution when there's already one here. So I give the solution freely to friends who ask for it - and it's only a small step from there to putting it on a website for everybody.
Second reason, which I suppose is implicit in the first: I get a kick out of feeling I've benefitted everybody. Not just those people who pay for my code, to the feeble extent the licence agreement permits them to benefit; but anyone with a web browser who wants to download useful stuff off me. By contrast, when I work at my day job I'm always conscious that I'm primarily working to benefit them, and that any benefit that comes to people outside the company is a necessary side effect and not the actual goal.
(Yes, I know I'm not benefitting absolutely everybody, because there are people who don't have computers, or don't want to do the same things as me with their computers, who have no need for the stuff I write. Doesn't bother me; what I like is the idea that anyone who wants my stuff can get it. It's not necessary for everyone in the world to want it. People who don't want it don't have to have it, and hey, that's cool too :-)
So one thing I'd like to know is, how can a non-AI-complete interface manage to be powerful and usable?
Currently, we have GUIs which are intuitively easy to use (unless you're my mum, who is virtually computer illiterate but much prefers CLIs) but provide relatively little power, and if you want to do a complex multi-stage operation you have to run through it step by step by hand. Then you get CLIs, which have massive scripting power and allow arbitrarily complex automated tasks, but which aren't the most obvious thing for the beginner. Hence the division into "beginner" and "expert" modes, which the review says Raskin thinks shouldn't exist.
The thing is, I can't imagine an interface that is 100% intuitive to use, without requiring the user to think about details of the interface, and simultaneously allows the sort of massive power you'd get from, say, putting together a five-command Unix pipeline that picks out all the lines that appear exactly twice in a text file. So if you aren't allowed separate beginner and expert modes, what can you possibly do?
The more I think about this, the more I think it has to be AI-complete, in fact; because the only way you can express a generic requirement like that to a non-AI computer is by programming. But that's precisely a process of concentrating on the details of the interface (language)! The only alternative to that is simply to describe to the computer what you want, and let it figure out how to get it - which requires AI. In other words, Raskin has to be advocating the HAL 9000 complete natural language interface. Intuitive, and powerful. Nothing else comes close.
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
The obvious alternative to a fixed category system is arbitrary search criteria.
"Computer, give me the document I was working on last week about Genghis Khan."
"Computer? Didn't I once write something that compared Bill Gates to a hibernating wombat?"
... and so on. The computer can retrieve your document based on any criteria you like, not just the one (or, counting symlinks, the several) you happened to file it under.
He'll be moving on to help other companies produce implementations of the OpenPGP standard. Don't most companies' employment contracts include a provision that you agree not to go into business in direct competition for n years afterwards? And wouldn't a competing implementation of the OpenPGP standard count?
Perhaps he didn't have a contract like that; since he started PGP the company himself, he presumably didn't bother to write himself a daft contract then, and maybe NAI didn't impose one on him when they bought him...
The protocol is called SSH. Now it's obvious that people will want to name their applications after the protocols they implement. So: either Tatu should have named his app and his protocol differently, and trademarked the app name only; or he shouldn't have trademarked the name. If he'd trademarked the app name only, OpenSSH would have named itself after the protocol and there'd have been no problem.
Releasing a supposedly "open" protocol and then trademarking the name is an evil business practice, because it means that only Tatu is allowed to name his implementation in the obvious way. It's the trademark analogy of the GIF trick: releasing a supposedly "open" file format and then patenting the only known algorithm that can generate it.
In fact, this is exactly equivalent to the GIF trick, because he's waited until the OpenSSH name is well established before acting. If he'd had a polite word right when OpenSSH was starting out, they'd probably have released it under a different name initially and nobody would have a problem now. But by waiting until they're established and then complaining, he's trying to force the change of a name people are used to - which will do harm to OpenSSH.
If Tatu were genuinely concerned about brand recognition, he would have (a) arranged that the protocol name could be used without restriction, instead of deliberately making it the same as his brand name; and (b) he would have notified OpenSSH at a more appropriate time. Given that he's done neither of these, it seems to me that he's using this trademark as a weapon, not a legitimate form of protection.
(Disclaimer: this is a moral position, not a legal one. The law will probably not recognise arguments like this. If so, the law needs fixing.)
"And so it begins."
"There is a hole in your BIND."
"What do you want?"
Excuse me? Surely the word "helped" suggests that more than one country was involved? So the wording should have been "One of the countries that helped ...".
Look at this as either a small pedantry or a point about US-centrism, whichever you prefer. I'm not quite sure which it is myself.
You write:
Do you mean the Debian package, perhaps? The NASM project has never been unmaintained as far as I know.
I always wanted to appear on Slashdot, but I never thought I'd do it by having years of my life slagged off in a front-page story. <kyle>You bastards!</kyle>
There's been a lot of dispute as to whether the intent of the GPL clause was to dual-license or to create a strange hybrid thing. I can answer that very simply: it was to dual-license.
We created the original NASM licence (which didn't even have the GPL clause) back in 1995 when understanding of the issues wasn't widespread like it is now. Nobody seemed to care that it wasn't GPL-compatible at the time - it was free enough for people's purposes.
After a while, Debian found NASM and packaged it up, and pointed out to us that it would have to go in "non-free" unless we were willing to dual-license with the GPL. We agreed to that, and I sent an email to the Debian package maintainer granting our permission for Debian to distribute their NASM package under the GPL, until such time as we got round to making it explicit in the real licence.
When we did make it explicit, we clearly didn't do it very well. But the intention has always been to dual-license.
Therefore, I don't see that there's a serious problem here, at least as far as intentions go. We wanted any user of NASM to have accepted (at least) one of the NASM half of the licence and the GPL. If you want to link NASM code with GPL code, you accept the GPL, and then you have no problem.
I downloaded the Minix sources and poked through them to see if I could find anything interesting or useful. One thing I'd have been particularly interested to see would have been the sources to the compiler. The world does not yet contain enough 8086-target compilers, for those maniacs who still don't think the range of available boot loaders is good enough.
I didn't find them. Anywhere. I found the compiler driver, the thing that invokes the various compiler passes in turn, but nothing else.
If they're intentionally not present, I'd have expected to see something in the FAQ or info pages saying so and saying why. Anyone know where they went?
(And I tried to compile Advent on the nearest Unix box. It seemed to work, but as soon as I typed "GET LAMP" it segfaulted. Arrgh! :-)
Something really bizarre happened to your URL there. You did of course Preview and check it before posting ... ? :-)
In any case, I know it's easy to install an ssh client in your Workspot workspace, because it's just like doing it on any other Unix. What I wanted to know is whether the machines come with the ssh server installed - which a user can't do for themselves at all.
I know plenty of people who'd love to have a free Unix account like this. A lot of them wouldn't want to have to access it through these bizarre VNC clients. The web site seemed curiously silent on this, but I'd like to know if they support ssh logins. If they don't, there's something seriously missing.
I wonder what their load is like? (And whether it'll increase after being slashdotted...) Last time I heard of a free-Unix-account setup, it was ludicrously overloaded. If it's not worth logging in because you won't be able to do anything once you get there, why bother?
And where are they getting their money from, if the major service is free? I didn't even see any adverts on the site. How are they going to stay around?
Non-commercial users, as I understand it, must also use RSAREF and aren't allowed to go with faster, better alternatives.
If RSA had found this problem before anybody else, scanning commercial entities to see if they were using the non-commercial-only RSAREF is only the half of it. They could also have scanned non- commercial entities to see if they were using non-RSAREF libraries. Patent violations! Cease And Desist! Kill! Kill! Kill!
You're serious?
I don't see any health warning in the man page for GNU rm. Is that really their negligence?
Well over 3/4 of the Universe is "potentially dangerous". Deal with it.
Err, factor primes?
I do not think that means what you think it means...
I get intensely irritated by these articles that tell me I'm not doing something in a way that implies it's bad.
Sure, I'm not "in touch" with the "Linux mainstream". I don't keep close track of which distribution is most popular, which distribution wins, what the latest commercial Linux-capable software releases are, and so on ... because I don't care.
When I find myself nowhere near either a worthwhile net connection or a CD writer with a worthwhile net connection, I'll go out and take an interest in what boxed Linux distributions are available. Until then, it doesn't matter to me. Is this bad?
As I see it, there are only two problems with the fact that I'm "out of touch" in the sense that I don't use the same distribution as the fabled Linux Mainstream.
So why shouldn't I lose touch? I keep my mind on the important thing: actually doing useful stuff with my computer systems. This is a bad thing how?