To monitor the mail on my phone, you have to get on AT&Ts network and sniff the SSL traffic between my iPhone and my mail servers, decrypt it, and then get the data out of there, or get your hands on my phone or my mail servers. Same is true with most android users setups...
With a Blackberry, you just have to go to blackberry and ask for a copy of the message, they sit in the middle because of a horrible architecture. They keep a copy of all messages in your mail box. They are a man in the middle with copies of your data, unencrypted.
There is no central server that contains all email for iPhone or Android users. There is for the blackberry.
Note, this is not so much true for the newer phones where you can (so I'm told) use direct IMAP and SMTP to your own servers, but for any older blackberry, the security is lower, not higher, by design, than any known iPhone or Android configuration.
He was trying to sell the phone to people as 'an apple prototype', how the fuck could you be stupid enough to try to claim he doesn't know who owns the phone?
This wasn't finding keys left when drunk, and the keys don't have a GPS... and typically the police don't do shit to a guy who calls and returns the keys or just leaves them. The cops will go after pretty much anyone that calls them up and says I found this guys keys, and I'll sell them back to your for $5000 however.
I'm sure you're great at making sure your customers get the product they want.
You clearly understand product testing and making sure all possible customers have been considered... which is why you wouldn't give any high profile products to 'lackeys'.
Of course, you are also beyond mistake and would never do anything like that yourself, ever, at any point in your life, would you? You've never lost anything, you don't even know the meaning of the words lost or lose (I bet you fully understand the feeling of being called a loser however).
You sir, clearly are a caring compassionate person, we can tell by the statements you've made since they are so caring, considerate and compassionate...
Just kidding, your a douche, a pot calling the kettle black. You're railing against the machine... that you act exactly like...
Gizmodo disassembled the phone to identify the chipsets used, as it was highly likely the phone was some sort of Chinese clone.
Look, just because you think you're being clever doesn't mean anyone is actually going to believe your lie. It doesn't matter how you try to twist it or what excuse you make up, everyone knows you're just spewing bullshit.
Gizmodo is a news organization
Thats debatable, even on a good day. They're more like a gang of hoodlums who write about their exploits on a blog than a journalistic organization. Most highschool journalism classes are more advanced, more professional, and more useful than the immature douches at Gizmodo.
and tried to contact Apple multiple times about it, Apple denied anything to do with it until they couldn't deny it any longer and then in typical Jobs fashion when someone spoils his secrets
No, Steve and douche bag were talking on the phone, Steve said 'give me my phone back', Gizmodo said 'only if you admit PUBLICALLY that its your phone'.
That is not journalism, that is extortion, Google it. You want to call someone spoiled? You might want to look at the extortionists.
they got vindictive and called in the SF Police, even though they knew exactly where to find the phone the entire time and were a lawyer meeting away from a reasonable return of their property.
When I steal your phone, and you locate it via GPS, what exactly are you going to do other than call the police? Would you not attempt to get your phone back when you know where its being held hostage? You'd just let me have it?
The other umbrella in the stand. They (stores, public businesses) have spares in the stand for just such purpose, as they may not get the one borrowed back tomorrow, but they'll get one back tomorrow even if its a different one or from some other store.
They didn't take it from the bar days later did they? No in fact, they took it from the table, that night, before the bar staff even got to it.
Seriously? Are you that stupid that you can't make rational comparisons without making one side out to be something completely imaginary that didn't happen?
And what does that accomplish? More people (me included) saying 'oh look, "anonymous" is acting like a bunch of annoying fucking douche bags again'? They aren't going to disrupt anything. They aren't going to take out the root dns servers, they aren't going to stop Verisign from doing business, they're just going to make more people realize how utterly retarded the whole concept is.
Anonymous is nothing but a group of spoiled brats who discovered someone elses scripts for DDoSing. Stop treating them like some sort of vigilante fighting the good fight, thats not what they are. 'They' are just a bunch of immature morons.
that rushes you half way to the end of the document in an indecipherable blur.
I've owned a droid and seen plenty of other Android devices... never does it scroll fast enough to be indecipherable, unless you're counting the jumps between the lag?
Do you live in Norway? I don't know anyone outside of Scandinavia who actually uses it. The only person I know that has EVER used it for any period of time was a Swede, but he didn't use it that long and went back to something normal.
Sure if you are a web developer you need to work much on FF and CR but nonetheless a lot of power users are die hard Opera fans and you know what? They are rightfully so. Also most of the devs I know and respect use Opera and the ones that don't use it are GPL advocates so it's a religious thing...
I don't know a single dev who uses Opera. I can't think of a single dev I know that uses Firefox because its GPL. If these are your observations than you need to leave the LUG meeting and join professionals in the real world. And for reference, I lead a rather large SaaS project, so we have more than a little experience with copious quantities of 'web developers'.
Opera is the only browser I have been using the past decade that hasn't screwed up big at one point or another. and yes, all the other browsers are copying them because their ideas work
Claiming browsers are copying Opera is like claiming Microsoft copied Apple for the mouse and windows on the screen. Its a silly statement, nothing Opera has done yet has been original. Everything they've done has been done by someone else before them, and don't even get me started on how retarded tabs are now days considering that they have reverted entirely to separate browser instances running on their own, the only difference between a tab and a new browser instance is that the tab shows in a browser window rather than on the dock/taskbar/whatever your OS users.
A good portion of why no one is copying gestures is because most of us know we don't want to make motions to control our browsers, we've had a Wii, we realize how annoying it is after the novelty wears off.
It's like IE vs. Netscape all over again, but now it's FF that's got people itching to leave.
So its EXACTLY like IE vs Netscape again.
IE does a little bit of catching up, and the Netscape crew runs themselves into the ground doing stupid shit their users want nothing to do with. What Mozilla is doing now is pretty much EXACTLY what they did as Netscape.
The difference now is that Chrome and to a lesser extent Safari are fully capable replacements for both.
I should also point out, they haven't 'invented' page flipping on pages either. Several websites I've visited either do it now or have done it in the past.
The end result is that the website gets redesigned because while we had to do side scrolling with books, turns out people find it rather obnoxious when the other choice is vertical scrolling.
The smart websites that used horizontal scrolling... did it in the past... and not for very long till they switched back to something normal.
So, if you start off with a working, stable kernel, apply this patch, and then end up with a broken, flaky kernel... what is the conclusion other than the driver is crap?
Uhm, so let me get this straight, never before has a third part bit of code exposed a buggy kernel API? I mean, thats what you're saying, that its impossible for it to be the kernels fault, because by itself its stable but with something that plugs in... its unstable.
If I wrote crappy code for a Windows app, do you think Microsoft would be willing to listen to me submitting bug reports in Windows if it was becoming readily apparent that the problem wasn't in their code?
In order to prove its NOT your code, you have to show how its the other persons code... and yes, thats how you deal with Microsoft and Apple and Sun/Oracle as a developer, you prove to them its their code, and by that point, if you have the source to their code, you should be able to fix it fairly easy. I've done this on multiple occasions. Thats how professional developers work with others.
So... we know that the vbox code IS open, so if he knows for a fact that vbox is broken, then a patch should be trivial in almost every circumstance.
When you say 'someone elses code is broken' you better have proof to back it up. When you have proof to backup open source code, the fix should be obvious almost instantly based on the proof of the bug.
I don't see this so much about NIH as "WTF makes this my problem".
The fact that a lot of people run Linux under virtual box makes it Redhats problem if they want to keep selling their warez and support to companies where developers use virtualbox to run Linux VMs for dev and testing. Its not really fucking rocket science to see how it effects all Linux users if you blow off one rather large and well known package that your userbase happens to use a lot of.
The Linux kernel is worthless if nothing anyone cares about works with it.
Instead of being an arrogant prick, he could have simply sent his research upstream to virtualbox and they likely could have fixed any problems fairly rapidly.
I guess what the kernel devs really want to do is say 'if your machine boots, any bugs are not our problem and we don't want bug reports because its not our code!'... and thats the NIH problem. First it was no debugging of crashes with binary drivers, now its no debugging kernels relating to GPL code thats not part of the main kernel tree.
Just exactly what ARE they doing then? Linux by itself is absolutely useless. A kernel has no use without things to go with it, this attitude is rapidly ensuring there is nothing to go with it that they recognize as important.
If you truly believe that just having a large collection of triggers to a bug is all that is required to render fixing that bug "fairly trivial", then I sincerely hope I never find myself on the same dev team as you.
The guy made a matter of fact statement that the driver was shit and he knew it. To make that statement where I work you better have proof. Such proof that that driver is in fact indisputably the problem requires showing the bugs.
I think there are probably problems with the driver as well, but I can not say it as a matter of fact.
Denying support for binary-blob drivers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The kernel developers have finite time for support.
And kernel users have a finite number of useful choices for hardware. The binary driver bullshit isn't about developer time, its about GPL political agenda and that was VERY CLEAR when it went into place, if you can't see that there is no point in continuing the discussion. Yes, its harder to debug problems with binaries only, but I do it every fucking day. Its far from impossible but yes it does take effort. But thats not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about is that they completely blowing off any bug reports from people who happen to use a binary driver, regardless of what the culprit actually is.
If they choose to spend their time on investigating issues where they are not blocked by arbitrary restrictions on the tools they need to do their job, then fine.
Seriously? You're going to whine about not having arbitrary restrictions on the tools they need to do their job when there are retarded arbitrary decisions like 'I don't like the vbox driver' at the very point of this discussion?
I find it quite feasible that in the time they could fix one bug caused by an external binary-blob driver they could probably fix 10 others.
Awesome, except no one gives a flying fuck about all those other drivers, they want their god damn wifi cards and nvidia GPUs to work right. If you fix 10 bugs that no one gives a flying fuck about you've still accomplished nothing useful. I don't care how awesome your GPL kernel is, if it doesn't work right on my hardware, its pointless. I'm not the only one that has hardware like this. Not everyone is a fanatical GPL zealot who tracks down the 4 pieces of hardware that actually work flawlessly in Linux with the OSS drivers... even though they are some of the shittiest hardware devices known to man, oh... but OPEN SOURCEZW#%!@#^.
Remember, this isn't a case of somebody just whining instead of doing something useful.
No, this is somebody projecting their whining on EVERY user of Linux under virtualbox by effectively downgrading the priority of handling issues related to virtualbox. He has made a change that effects FAR more than JUST HIM and what he has to do today or tomorrow. If it was JUST him, he could have done something else of his own free will, but instead he's decided that its not important enough for not only him, but for several other people who also have limited time to do things.
I don't care what HE works on, he is projecting his opinion on others based on matter of fact statements that he either can not prove or he's being a lazy douche and just not fixing things he has found. I don't really care which way you go with it on that one, the end result is the same, if you keep making arbitary restriction and blaming it on 'other peoples arbitrary restrictions' even your biggest zealots errr, fans are eventually going to get tired of your stupid bullshit and move on to other seas.
I'm not sure what other problems people are going to be concerned about with closed source software that is of a higher priority than 'it doesn't fucking work'.
I don't care how 'open' something is, if its broken, its not going to be something I use and its value is 0 if it doesn't do what I want.
You can make the argument you're making with features and feature sets, it becomes a really fucking stupid argument however when you're trying to say 'well just because this OSS software doesn't do what you want, it still is useful because you have the source... to something that doesn't do what you want'.
So what would I want to avoid more than 'it doesn't work' that OSS offers me?
Really, you should just refuse to provide any help or consideration for people using virtual box like you guys do if anyone is using a binary driver. I mean lets face it, thats what you're doing here. This is just another form of NIH syndrome.
As a developer, I understand the frustration of dealing with someone elses shitty software that you have absolutely no control over.
This however is one of those situations where there is no doubt what so ever that rather than just whining about it, he could have done something useful about it. The drivers aren't THAT complex in the first place. If he is so confident that it has these problems then surely he has documented when they occur as proof, which means fixing them should be fairly trivial as well.
Instead of being so high and mighty... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.
Ah yes, its always good to encourage a developer to steal software from other developers, thats exactly how to show that you deserve to be paid for your profession... by ripping off others in your profession trying to do the same thing.
If its common, and he survives and/or thrives, then it shows that he is in fact capable of dealing with reality rather than an idealistic fantasy where we all quit our jobs and go work for the perfect company that just does everything right all the time.
Most places that aren't pure software development houses are like this in some form or another, if you don't work at any of them you're going to have to be a pretty fucking good developer because those jobs are far fewer and have far higher expectations.
And to put it bluntly, if you'd walk into my organization with that attitude, I'd never hire you as a developer. The last thing I need is some arrogant little newbie developer come in telling me how 'I'm doing it wrong because I don't do what Linus/Stallman' does, which is about what you sound like. You're making blanket statements as if they are fact for every situation and they aren't.
You really show how little experience you actually have in your post here.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it backwards.
To monitor the mail on my phone, you have to get on AT&Ts network and sniff the SSL traffic between my iPhone and my mail servers, decrypt it, and then get the data out of there, or get your hands on my phone or my mail servers. Same is true with most android users setups ...
With a Blackberry, you just have to go to blackberry and ask for a copy of the message, they sit in the middle because of a horrible architecture. They keep a copy of all messages in your mail box. They are a man in the middle with copies of your data, unencrypted.
There is no central server that contains all email for iPhone or Android users. There is for the blackberry.
Note, this is not so much true for the newer phones where you can (so I'm told) use direct IMAP and SMTP to your own servers, but for any older blackberry, the security is lower, not higher, by design, than any known iPhone or Android configuration.
Roaming costs are only expensive because of the carriers, not for any technical reason.
You don't know what 'begging the question' means. Whats your point?
He was trying to sell the phone to people as 'an apple prototype', how the fuck could you be stupid enough to try to claim he doesn't know who owns the phone?
This wasn't finding keys left when drunk, and the keys don't have a GPS ... and typically the police don't do shit to a guy who calls and returns the keys or just leaves them. The cops will go after pretty much anyone that calls them up and says I found this guys keys, and I'll sell them back to your for $5000 however.
Get a clue.
I'm sure you're great at making sure your customers get the product they want.
You clearly understand product testing and making sure all possible customers have been considered ... which is why you wouldn't give any high profile products to 'lackeys'.
Of course, you are also beyond mistake and would never do anything like that yourself, ever, at any point in your life, would you? You've never lost anything, you don't even know the meaning of the words lost or lose (I bet you fully understand the feeling of being called a loser however).
You sir, clearly are a caring compassionate person, we can tell by the statements you've made since they are so caring, considerate and compassionate ...
Just kidding, your a douche, a pot calling the kettle black. You're railing against the machine ... that you act exactly like ...
Hypocrite, google it, its what you are.
Gizmodo disassembled the phone to identify the chipsets used, as it was highly likely the phone was some sort of Chinese clone.
Look, just because you think you're being clever doesn't mean anyone is actually going to believe your lie. It doesn't matter how you try to twist it or what excuse you make up, everyone knows you're just spewing bullshit.
Gizmodo is a news organization
Thats debatable, even on a good day. They're more like a gang of hoodlums who write about their exploits on a blog than a journalistic organization. Most highschool journalism classes are more advanced, more professional, and more useful than the immature douches at Gizmodo.
and tried to contact Apple multiple times about it, Apple denied anything to do with it until they couldn't deny it any longer and then in typical Jobs fashion when someone spoils his secrets
No, Steve and douche bag were talking on the phone, Steve said 'give me my phone back', Gizmodo said 'only if you admit PUBLICALLY that its your phone'.
That is not journalism, that is extortion, Google it. You want to call someone spoiled? You might want to look at the extortionists.
they got vindictive and called in the SF Police, even though they knew exactly where to find the phone the entire time and were a lawyer meeting away from a reasonable return of their property.
When I steal your phone, and you locate it via GPS, what exactly are you going to do other than call the police? Would you not attempt to get your phone back when you know where its being held hostage? You'd just let me have it?
It wasn't the law of the land in Kindergarten either, then, just as now, that was just justification for stealing from someone.
The other umbrella in the stand. They (stores, public businesses) have spares in the stand for just such purpose, as they may not get the one borrowed back tomorrow, but they'll get one back tomorrow even if its a different one or from some other store.
They didn't take it from the bar days later did they? No in fact, they took it from the table, that night, before the bar staff even got to it.
Seriously? Are you that stupid that you can't make rational comparisons without making one side out to be something completely imaginary that didn't happen?
And what does that accomplish? More people (me included) saying 'oh look, "anonymous" is acting like a bunch of annoying fucking douche bags again'? They aren't going to disrupt anything. They aren't going to take out the root dns servers, they aren't going to stop Verisign from doing business, they're just going to make more people realize how utterly retarded the whole concept is.
Anonymous is nothing but a group of spoiled brats who discovered someone elses scripts for DDoSing. Stop treating them like some sort of vigilante fighting the good fight, thats not what they are. 'They' are just a bunch of immature morons.
that rushes you half way to the end of the document in an indecipherable blur.
I've owned a droid and seen plenty of other Android devices ... never does it scroll fast enough to be indecipherable, unless you're counting the jumps between the lag?
You don't like it. We do like it very much.
Do you live in Norway? I don't know anyone outside of Scandinavia who actually uses it. The only person I know that has EVER used it for any period of time was a Swede, but he didn't use it that long and went back to something normal.
Sure if you are a web developer you need to work much on FF and CR but nonetheless a lot of power users are die hard Opera fans and you know what? They are rightfully so. Also most of the devs I know and respect use Opera and the ones that don't use it are GPL advocates so it's a religious thing...
I don't know a single dev who uses Opera. I can't think of a single dev I know that uses Firefox because its GPL. If these are your observations than you need to leave the LUG meeting and join professionals in the real world. And for reference, I lead a rather large SaaS project, so we have more than a little experience with copious quantities of 'web developers'.
Opera is the only browser I have been using the past decade that hasn't screwed up big at one point or another. and yes, all the other browsers are copying them because their ideas work
Claiming browsers are copying Opera is like claiming Microsoft copied Apple for the mouse and windows on the screen. Its a silly statement, nothing Opera has done yet has been original. Everything they've done has been done by someone else before them, and don't even get me started on how retarded tabs are now days considering that they have reverted entirely to separate browser instances running on their own, the only difference between a tab and a new browser instance is that the tab shows in a browser window rather than on the dock/taskbar/whatever your OS users.
A good portion of why no one is copying gestures is because most of us know we don't want to make motions to control our browsers, we've had a Wii, we realize how annoying it is after the novelty wears off.
It's like IE vs. Netscape all over again, but now it's FF that's got people itching to leave.
So its EXACTLY like IE vs Netscape again.
IE does a little bit of catching up, and the Netscape crew runs themselves into the ground doing stupid shit their users want nothing to do with. What Mozilla is doing now is pretty much EXACTLY what they did as Netscape.
The difference now is that Chrome and to a lesser extent Safari are fully capable replacements for both.
I should also point out, they haven't 'invented' page flipping on pages either. Several websites I've visited either do it now or have done it in the past.
The end result is that the website gets redesigned because while we had to do side scrolling with books, turns out people find it rather obnoxious when the other choice is vertical scrolling.
The smart websites that used horizontal scrolling ... did it in the past ... and not for very long till they switched back to something normal.
Nor did they invent side bars, user scripts, or encoded password managers.
All of those things were around before Opera the browser or the company existed.
So, if you start off with a working, stable kernel, apply this patch, and then end up with a broken, flaky kernel ... what is the conclusion other than the driver is crap?
Uhm, so let me get this straight, never before has a third part bit of code exposed a buggy kernel API? I mean, thats what you're saying, that its impossible for it to be the kernels fault, because by itself its stable but with something that plugs in ... its unstable.
If I wrote crappy code for a Windows app, do you think Microsoft would be willing to listen to me submitting bug reports in Windows if it was becoming readily apparent that the problem wasn't in their code?
In order to prove its NOT your code, you have to show how its the other persons code ... and yes, thats how you deal with Microsoft and Apple and Sun/Oracle as a developer, you prove to them its their code, and by that point, if you have the source to their code, you should be able to fix it fairly easy. I've done this on multiple occasions. Thats how professional developers work with others.
So ... we know that the vbox code IS open, so if he knows for a fact that vbox is broken, then a patch should be trivial in almost every circumstance.
When you say 'someone elses code is broken' you better have proof to back it up. When you have proof to backup open source code, the fix should be obvious almost instantly based on the proof of the bug.
I don't see this so much about NIH as "WTF makes this my problem".
The fact that a lot of people run Linux under virtual box makes it Redhats problem if they want to keep selling their warez and support to companies where developers use virtualbox to run Linux VMs for dev and testing. Its not really fucking rocket science to see how it effects all Linux users if you blow off one rather large and well known package that your userbase happens to use a lot of.
The Linux kernel is worthless if nothing anyone cares about works with it.
Instead of being an arrogant prick, he could have simply sent his research upstream to virtualbox and they likely could have fixed any problems fairly rapidly.
I guess what the kernel devs really want to do is say 'if your machine boots, any bugs are not our problem and we don't want bug reports because its not our code!' ... and thats the NIH problem. First it was no debugging of crashes with binary drivers, now its no debugging kernels relating to GPL code thats not part of the main kernel tree.
Just exactly what ARE they doing then? Linux by itself is absolutely useless. A kernel has no use without things to go with it, this attitude is rapidly ensuring there is nothing to go with it that they recognize as important.
If you truly believe that just having a large collection of triggers to a bug is all that is required to render fixing that bug "fairly trivial", then I sincerely hope I never find myself on the same dev team as you.
The guy made a matter of fact statement that the driver was shit and he knew it. To make that statement where I work you better have proof. Such proof that that driver is in fact indisputably the problem requires showing the bugs.
I think there are probably problems with the driver as well, but I can not say it as a matter of fact.
Denying support for binary-blob drivers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The kernel developers have finite time for support.
And kernel users have a finite number of useful choices for hardware. The binary driver bullshit isn't about developer time, its about GPL political agenda and that was VERY CLEAR when it went into place, if you can't see that there is no point in continuing the discussion. Yes, its harder to debug problems with binaries only, but I do it every fucking day. Its far from impossible but yes it does take effort. But thats not what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about is that they completely blowing off any bug reports from people who happen to use a binary driver, regardless of what the culprit actually is.
If they choose to spend their time on investigating issues where they are not blocked by arbitrary restrictions on the tools they need to do their job, then fine.
Seriously? You're going to whine about not having arbitrary restrictions on the tools they need to do their job when there are retarded arbitrary decisions like 'I don't like the vbox driver' at the very point of this discussion?
I find it quite feasible that in the time they could fix one bug caused by an external binary-blob driver they could probably fix 10 others.
Awesome, except no one gives a flying fuck about all those other drivers, they want their god damn wifi cards and nvidia GPUs to work right. If you fix 10 bugs that no one gives a flying fuck about you've still accomplished nothing useful. I don't care how awesome your GPL kernel is, if it doesn't work right on my hardware, its pointless. I'm not the only one that has hardware like this. Not everyone is a fanatical GPL zealot who tracks down the 4 pieces of hardware that actually work flawlessly in Linux with the OSS drivers ... even though they are some of the shittiest hardware devices known to man, oh ... but OPEN SOURCEZW#%!@#^.
Remember, this isn't a case of somebody just whining instead of doing something useful.
No, this is somebody projecting their whining on EVERY user of Linux under virtualbox by effectively downgrading the priority of handling issues related to virtualbox. He has made a change that effects FAR more than JUST HIM and what he has to do today or tomorrow. If it was JUST him, he could have done something else of his own free will, but instead he's decided that its not important enough for not only him, but for several other people who also have limited time to do things.
I don't care what HE works on, he is projecting his opinion on others based on matter of fact statements that he either can not prove or he's being a lazy douche and just not fixing things he has found. I don't really care which way you go with it on that one, the end result is the same, if you keep making arbitary restriction and blaming it on 'other peoples arbitrary restrictions' even your biggest zealots errr, fans are eventually going to get tired of your stupid bullshit and move on to other seas.
Or use a PXE boot disk. Not arguing with your point, just adding a work around for your point.
I'm not sure what other problems people are going to be concerned about with closed source software that is of a higher priority than 'it doesn't fucking work'.
I don't care how 'open' something is, if its broken, its not going to be something I use and its value is 0 if it doesn't do what I want.
You can make the argument you're making with features and feature sets, it becomes a really fucking stupid argument however when you're trying to say 'well just because this OSS software doesn't do what you want, it still is useful because you have the source ... to something that doesn't do what you want'.
So what would I want to avoid more than 'it doesn't work' that OSS offers me?
Yes, it will certainly be open source by the time humanity ceases to exist, but no one will care then.
Really, you should just refuse to provide any help or consideration for people using virtual box like you guys do if anyone is using a binary driver. I mean lets face it, thats what you're doing here. This is just another form of NIH syndrome.
As a developer, I understand the frustration of dealing with someone elses shitty software that you have absolutely no control over.
This however is one of those situations where there is no doubt what so ever that rather than just whining about it, he could have done something useful about it. The drivers aren't THAT complex in the first place. If he is so confident that it has these problems then surely he has documented when they occur as proof, which means fixing them should be fairly trivial as well.
Instead of being so high and mighty ... oh never mind, whats the point, its not your fault, its someone elses, your code is awesome and everyone will bow down to you guys. I know you guys like to think Linux is ruling the world, but you're still no where near big enough to start trying to pull an Apple/Google/Microsoft and force people to do it your way. You've tried this before and again, you'll lose.
Anything that can't be automatically tested should probably be redesigned to have some test hooks added.
Then you're testing the code you added to do testing, not the code you needed to test.
If you're redesigning your code JUST for the purposes of testing, you've failed to understand what you're trying to test.
Ah yes, its always good to encourage a developer to steal software from other developers, thats exactly how to show that you deserve to be paid for your profession ... by ripping off others in your profession trying to do the same thing.
Grow up.
...
If its common, and he survives and/or thrives, then it shows that he is in fact capable of dealing with reality rather than an idealistic fantasy where we all quit our jobs and go work for the perfect company that just does everything right all the time.
Most places that aren't pure software development houses are like this in some form or another, if you don't work at any of them you're going to have to be a pretty fucking good developer because those jobs are far fewer and have far higher expectations.
And to put it bluntly, if you'd walk into my organization with that attitude, I'd never hire you as a developer. The last thing I need is some arrogant little newbie developer come in telling me how 'I'm doing it wrong because I don't do what Linus/Stallman' does, which is about what you sound like. You're making blanket statements as if they are fact for every situation and they aren't.
You really show how little experience you actually have in your post here.