I have no hard data to back this up but IIRC when 9/11 happened it took out a major Internet switch center as well. Everyone talked about how traffic would get routed from Europe to America via Asia and the Pacific links but the reality was that most of America was unreachable from Europe for quite a few days. I suspect the places that were reachable had European mirrors. While there was a viable route it wasn't able to cope with the increase in traffic so basically every packet timed out.
The Internet will IMVHO always be quite fragile. While the design lends itself to robustness the reality is that there is only money for a few very big connections and therefore a disaster that affects one of these connections is going to cause wide spread outages.
Take, for instance, the connections running between Europe and America. I bet most of them run in almost exactly the same place on the sea bed because it's the cheapest / shortest path to take. A fairly localized geological disaster (at least in geological terms) could cut all the cables at once; or at least enough to make to difference.
If we wanted the network to be robust we would need to run cables up over the north pole and round the equator and probably stick in some satelite links as well. There just isn't money for that. People are willing to accept the risk that it might fail in extreme situations.
FWIW I think the problem is worse on the global scale than the country scale. I imagine most developed countries probably have enough redundancy in their own country. It's the interconnects between countries that are probably the biggest problem.
At the moment MSO dominates the market place but it isn't to much of a stretch of the imagination to see OOo / SO taking a fair chunk out of that in the medium term. MS could stop the rot over night by releasing MSO for Linux.
It's obvious that MSO is being used to tie people into Windows but how long can that continue for? If Linux + OOo managed to get the point where they accounted for 10% of the market there would start to be some serious everyday interoperability problems for regular users. This would force MS to either support OOo document formats, open their format more or release MSO for Linux.
If you don't believe this is the case just look at the way websites have changed in the last 18 months to 2 years. It is now fairly rare to find a website that wares a badge of honor telling users it only works with IE. The situation was very different just a short while ago.
Personally I would like to see MSO on Linux even though I staunchly support OOo. It would give the OOo developers a good challenge and would fill a hole in the Linux market place and hopefully remove a lot of barriers to Linux adoption. I also think that having MS start to enter the Linux arena would send very loud signals to people Linux is ready for the prime time. Hopefully it would also galvanize effort across the whole OSS area to create better software and "pull together" a bit more.
I very rarely post this type of comment but I felt I had to applaud you for putting together such a lucid and clear post detailing the GPs mistakes / misunderstandings. It makes a refreshing change. Opinion has only one p BTW.
RIAA files suit against God for "willful neglect" in creating man. The suit goes on to describe a number of ways that man is flawed including but not limited to:
Won't always do as it's told.
Refuses to hand over all money and it's eternal soul to RIAA.
Refuses to enjoy modern cra^H^H^H music as much as it should and demands creativity.
It could be argued (although it's quite tenuous) that the film financiers take a gamble, with the risk of losing their money vs the chance of making a profit. The license fee payers take no such gamble, so don't get such a great reward.
The licence payers do take a gamble. They put money into the pot and trust the people running the BBC (and oddly enough the people have no say over who runs the BBC) to produce quality programming that they want to watch and can be sold abroad. Sometimes it doesn't workout and a huge amount of money is wasted. Do you remember Eldorado?
We get the seriously short end of the stick when you consider that you aren't allowed to own a TV without paying the license fee even if you don't watch any BBC content. In that respect you are guilty till proven innocent.
I'm particularly against the license fee as a way for paying for content as I have had the BBC threaten to break my front door down and search the house for contraband TVs. Many people who own a TV don't understand the hassle you get for not owning one. The TVLA have a special exception (or at least and understanding) when it comes to getting search warrents - they are never refused. Have a read about some of my dealings here.
There is no comparison here. The author of a newspaper article (assuming the writer is freelance) is the one that has invested the money (and took the risk) into creating a given article. It is right and proper they should own the copyright to that article. The newspaper licenses the article, end of story (sorry bad pun).
This is comparable to the BBC licensing a show from another production company. I would never argue that they own the copyright on that content (unless they actually bought the copyright of course).
I can see where you are coming from. In house writers for the newspaper are paid for by the price of the paper and the advertising contained within. The material produced by these writer should be owed by the paper.
The BBC, however, is not like this. The creation of the BBC was paid for by the licence fee the creation of the newspaper was by individuals who took a risk with their own money. The BBC and all it's works should therefore be owned by the people that paid for it to be created.
As another poster pointed out you only have to pay the fee if you have a device capable of recieving the transmition. Hence, you would have to pay for a PC TV tuner card.
Up until the bulb blew I watched movies using a projector now I am back to using the computer:o(
Lets seperate the medium that delivers the content from the content itself as the medium is secondary to the argument. By asking how it is different to a DVD I think you are really asking how is it different to a film made by an independent studio.
When making a film someone stumps up a big pile of money with the hope of recovering that money through the sale of the film (eg cinema / DVD sales). Providing the money to make the film is a risk and the person / people who do so have a right to expect to own the content at the end of the process so that they can make money from it.
In the case of the BBC the license directly pays for the creation of the content. Thus it should be fair to assume that the people paying the license fee own the content. The difference is subtle but important. The public have accepted teh risk by paying the fee but don't own the product. That's got to be wrong.
If you take the view that the people who paid for the creation of the content own teh content then there is no sensible reason for DRM if both parties have paid. The problem only comes if the content is passed on to someone who hasn't paid. DRM might be able to stop just them viewing the content but it is unlikely.
I can certianly sympathize with you. I often wondered why we paid for the creation of the content but didn't have more rights to it. If you paid for anything else to be created you would naturally assume that you would own it at the end. Surely anyone who pays the licence fee should be able to give a copy of a show to anyone else who pays the fee (tax).
It doesn't bother me much any more though. I got rid of the TV 5 or 6 years ago and so have saved around £600 in license fees. I can't say I have missed it either. I have a decent sized DVD collection for those times when I really want to kick back and watch something. There have always been a few shows though that I have wanted to watch such as some of the nature pieces. They normally eventually come out on DVD but that's not quite the same. Hopefully this will mean I will be able to pick up such shows for a tiny price.
The thing that worries me, however, is that we will end up with an Internet tax in much the same way as they have in Germany. Be prepared to fight for you right to not pay the BBC.
I'll swap you your rations of food and water for a Linux CD. Nice one. While you are dehydrating and starving sucking on your CD I'll be living it up on your food and water.
You have become to reliant on having instant communication with people beyond shouting distance. What could you possibly have to say to anyone beyond shouting distance that is going to make a difference in the given situation? Absolutely nothing.
Get a grip and realize that you aren't that important and that you don't have anything important to say. If you are stuck in the wake of a disaster the best thing you can do is get yourself to an evacuation camp as fast as you can (assuming they are set up). Everything, and I mean everything, else is secondary.
As for communications. The people coming to help you will bring their own communication that is tried and tested in emergency situation. You pay a huge amount of tax to ensure that these emergency systems are in place and can be deployed in this type of situation.
I'm sure you need computers to organize a relief effort but do you _really_ need a custom live Linux distribution that isn't ready until two weeks after the event? Hardly. This guy would have been better off going down there and shovelling dirt off the streets like the rest of the people actually trying to help.
Technology doesn't help that much in situations like this despite what you migh like to think. If I had a choice between a glass of clean water and an Internet connected PC I know what I would choose any day of the week.
When push comes to shove people seem to do pretty damn well at coordinating and communicating by just talking to each other. Amazingly, this doesn't require computers at all.
Give the guy in the article a pat on the head for trying to help then get on with actually helping people.
Yes, it's very different. You didn't get any space back when you defragged your drive although it might look like you did on the fancy defrag graphical display because the display doesn't depict reality very well.
FAT 16/32 (not win16/32) drives get fragmented quickly because of the way files are written to the drive in basically a splatter gun fashion with little regard to using the space sensibly. NTFS has a much more inteligent method for writting files to the disk which helps avoid fragmentation. Fragmentation still occurs it's just not as bad as when you use FAT 16/32.
This log based file system mentioned int eh article is a totally different way of laying out the file structure that isn't really comparable. The GP gave a pretty good description of how it works so there's not much point me repeating it here suffice to say that any modified file will be (possibly badly) fragmented. The fragmentation isn't the only cause of slow access times though. Playing back the log is expensive as well.
I agree with almost everything you say except the bit about encryption not being unbreakable. While I admit that in theory all current encryption schemes are breakable it is easy to encrypt something so that it is for all intents and purposes unbreakable without the key. Of course this assumes that there isn't a flaw in the encryption method and that nobody has built a quantum computer naturally. The first could be partially overcome by multiply encrypting the data with different methods - thus requireing a flaw to be found in each.
Anyway that's beside the point. The OP must be on crack or something. If the disaster is so big one of the worlds leading cities is never inhabitable again the guy, his wife and everyone they know is probably dead anyway. What the point planning for a situation you can't hope to live though. You might as well just enjoy the here and now. As for saving your CC numbers - hahahahha = like anyone will accept credit cards. You might be able to barter with food and water but that's about it.
Personally I would take water purification tablets and a 5 * 1 litre bottles of water as my number one thing to pack (more if I have space). After that I would pack low salt high energy food + a small pot of salt (allows you to replace salt when you need it rather than every time you eat). Some sturdy cloth would be useful as it would be easy to rig up a crude filter if you have to drink muddy water (at least the water will be free from bigger bits and the purification tablets will see to the rest - last resort though as "purified" water is horrible). A few boxes of matches sealed in plastic bags would be good as well as a really big coat. And finally, an assortment of large sturdy knives and a hand axe. No where in my list of essentials would I include a USB flash drive.
I already have this system and it works great. It's called NFS. Just NFS mount your home directory to the server and away you go. With the right security you could even do it over the Internet. Ok it means you still have to have fat clients but then you would probably still need a fat client for a broswer based office suite. Of course if everything is done on the server side including rendering then anything that can run VNC will do but the lag would make it unuseable IMHO.
And you think your employer would let you write personal documents while at work sitting at their computer using their LAN and their bandwidth?
As for them being expensive. Yes they are fairly expensive but what are you doing with it? If you want the "latest and greatest" and you want to play games on it then yes it's going to be expensive. If you want to edit a few office documents (which lets face it is what you would be able to do with the proposed web interface) then you aren't looking at that much.
The problems you mention have, I'm sure, been met by every software developer on the planet however that doesn't necessarly mean that the solution used (just changing the code without updating the spec) is the correct solution. I would argue that the correct solution is to make it cheaper (in terms of time) to update the spec. If a small error is found in the spec that is unlikely (in the developers opinion) to impact the rest of the project it shouldn't take more than a few moments for an update and sign off. The problem with not updating the spec till the end is that occasionaly a change will be made that will affect the system in ways that the original discoverer won't realize and nobody but the developer will know about it. Before you know it a million CDs have been pressed that are all useless (I've seen someing like this happen and I nearly fell off my chair laughing as the team that had screwed up blame stormed each other for a week).
I'm not sure all of CS is akin to maths some is closer to engineering IMHO. Having said that I don't think CS is a science. Science to my mind discovers things about the universe around us. This description perfectly fits physics, chemistry and biology as well as their off shoots such as astronomy. CS on the other hand hasn't told us one single truth about the universe. Hence it is not science. It has, however, applied the truths we have discovered about the universe which oddly enough is the definition of engineering. CS just jumped on the science bandwagon because it got more funding / sounded better.
If nothing else comments like this are ammunition for the people who dislike / want to crush Linux (and OSS in general). While I know from experience that the kernel is a quality piece of software and highly reliable if I was new to Linux and considering moving my company over to it comments like this would scare me. It's not that a spec necessarly improves the quality of the software it just improves confidence that the people writting it have a clue about what they hope to acheive.
I, too, didn't believe in writting specs when I was in college. Most of the projects I worked on were either loner affairs or the group was very small so communication was good. When I got into the commercial world though it was a very different ball game. After working on a couple of projects that failed horribly because half the team was confused about what it was supposed to be doing I realized that a spec is a very useful tool.
In my experience the better developers didn't need the spec as much as the poorer developers. The good developers almost understood without words what the other good developers would do in a given situation. The problem was no one could predict what the poorer developers would do in a given situation. This led to large chunks of the system not working / intergrating properly (I freely admit there were other serious management problems on these projecs as well) and needing huge amounts of resources to bring them back on track.
Later projects where there was a spec (even quite an informal spec) produced a better system in less time with fewer resources. I know this sounds like the same old pap that is dished up to every CS student but it really does work on non-trivial projects.
I certainly believe that the spec can be taken to far though. I have seen some projects never even get off the ground for the want of a quick hacked together bit of proof of concept code. The secret is in hitting that fine line between anarchy and unanarchy (there is no good single word antonym for anarchy so I propose unanarchy).
Perhaps the kernel only has uber leet hackers working on it. Somehow I doubt that though.
Slashdot Mirror
...they get a replacement up there won't be any ice left to study.
...is a time machine, some bad 80's special effects and a big guy with a difficult to pronounce name and we can have ourselves judgement day.
Of course they are only allowed to do this because the copyright period has just expired.
I have no hard data to back this up but IIRC when 9/11 happened it took out a major Internet switch center as well. Everyone talked about how traffic would get routed from Europe to America via Asia and the Pacific links but the reality was that most of America was unreachable from Europe for quite a few days. I suspect the places that were reachable had European mirrors. While there was a viable route it wasn't able to cope with the increase in traffic so basically every packet timed out.
The Internet will IMVHO always be quite fragile. While the design lends itself to robustness the reality is that there is only money for a few very big connections and therefore a disaster that affects one of these connections is going to cause wide spread outages.
Take, for instance, the connections running between Europe and America. I bet most of them run in almost exactly the same place on the sea bed because it's the cheapest / shortest path to take. A fairly localized geological disaster (at least in geological terms) could cut all the cables at once; or at least enough to make to difference.
If we wanted the network to be robust we would need to run cables up over the north pole and round the equator and probably stick in some satelite links as well. There just isn't money for that. People are willing to accept the risk that it might fail in extreme situations.
FWIW I think the problem is worse on the global scale than the country scale. I imagine most developed countries probably have enough redundancy in their own country. It's the interconnects between countries that are probably the biggest problem.
At the moment MSO dominates the market place but it isn't to much of a stretch of the imagination to see OOo / SO taking a fair chunk out of that in the medium term. MS could stop the rot over night by releasing MSO for Linux.
It's obvious that MSO is being used to tie people into Windows but how long can that continue for? If Linux + OOo managed to get the point where they accounted for 10% of the market there would start to be some serious everyday interoperability problems for regular users. This would force MS to either support OOo document formats, open their format more or release MSO for Linux.
If you don't believe this is the case just look at the way websites have changed in the last 18 months to 2 years. It is now fairly rare to find a website that wares a badge of honor telling users it only works with IE. The situation was very different just a short while ago.
Personally I would like to see MSO on Linux even though I staunchly support OOo. It would give the OOo developers a good challenge and would fill a hole in the Linux market place and hopefully remove a lot of barriers to Linux adoption. I also think that having MS start to enter the Linux arena would send very loud signals to people Linux is ready for the prime time. Hopefully it would also galvanize effort across the whole OSS area to create better software and "pull together" a bit more.
I very rarely post this type of comment but I felt I had to applaud you for putting together such a lucid and clear post detailing the GPs mistakes / misunderstandings. It makes a refreshing change. Opinion has only one p BTW.
RIAA files suit against God for "willful neglect" in creating man. The suit goes on to describe a number of ways that man is flawed including but not limited to:
...somebody think of the children!
failure.
Will these people never learn?
The licence payers do take a gamble. They put money into the pot and trust the people running the BBC (and oddly enough the people have no say over who runs the BBC) to produce quality programming that they want to watch and can be sold abroad. Sometimes it doesn't workout and a huge amount of money is wasted. Do you remember Eldorado?
We get the seriously short end of the stick when you consider that you aren't allowed to own a TV without paying the license fee even if you don't watch any BBC content. In that respect you are guilty till proven innocent.
I'm particularly against the license fee as a way for paying for content as I have had the BBC threaten to break my front door down and search the house for contraband TVs. Many people who own a TV don't understand the hassle you get for not owning one. The TVLA have a special exception (or at least and understanding) when it comes to getting search warrents - they are never refused. Have a read about some of my dealings here.
There is no comparison here. The author of a newspaper article (assuming the writer is freelance) is the one that has invested the money (and took the risk) into creating a given article. It is right and proper they should own the copyright to that article. The newspaper licenses the article, end of story (sorry bad pun).
This is comparable to the BBC licensing a show from another production company. I would never argue that they own the copyright on that content (unless they actually bought the copyright of course).
I can see where you are coming from. In house writers for the newspaper are paid for by the price of the paper and the advertising contained within. The material produced by these writer should be owed by the paper.
The BBC, however, is not like this. The creation of the BBC was paid for by the licence fee the creation of the newspaper was by individuals who took a risk with their own money. The BBC and all it's works should therefore be owned by the people that paid for it to be created.
As another poster pointed out you only have to pay the fee if you have a device capable of recieving the transmition. Hence, you would have to pay for a PC TV tuner card.
Up until the bulb blew I watched movies using a projector now I am back to using the computer :o(
Lets seperate the medium that delivers the content from the content itself as the medium is secondary to the argument. By asking how it is different to a DVD I think you are really asking how is it different to a film made by an independent studio.
When making a film someone stumps up a big pile of money with the hope of recovering that money through the sale of the film (eg cinema / DVD sales). Providing the money to make the film is a risk and the person / people who do so have a right to expect to own the content at the end of the process so that they can make money from it.
In the case of the BBC the license directly pays for the creation of the content. Thus it should be fair to assume that the people paying the license fee own the content. The difference is subtle but important. The public have accepted teh risk by paying the fee but don't own the product. That's got to be wrong.
If you take the view that the people who paid for the creation of the content own teh content then there is no sensible reason for DRM if both parties have paid. The problem only comes if the content is passed on to someone who hasn't paid. DRM might be able to stop just them viewing the content but it is unlikely.
I can certianly sympathize with you. I often wondered why we paid for the creation of the content but didn't have more rights to it. If you paid for anything else to be created you would naturally assume that you would own it at the end. Surely anyone who pays the licence fee should be able to give a copy of a show to anyone else who pays the fee (tax).
It doesn't bother me much any more though. I got rid of the TV 5 or 6 years ago and so have saved around £600 in license fees. I can't say I have missed it either. I have a decent sized DVD collection for those times when I really want to kick back and watch something. There have always been a few shows though that I have wanted to watch such as some of the nature pieces. They normally eventually come out on DVD but that's not quite the same. Hopefully this will mean I will be able to pick up such shows for a tiny price.
The thing that worries me, however, is that we will end up with an Internet tax in much the same way as they have in Germany. Be prepared to fight for you right to not pay the BBC.
I'll swap you your rations of food and water for a Linux CD. Nice one. While you are dehydrating and starving sucking on your CD I'll be living it up on your food and water.
You have become to reliant on having instant communication with people beyond shouting distance. What could you possibly have to say to anyone beyond shouting distance that is going to make a difference in the given situation? Absolutely nothing.
Get a grip and realize that you aren't that important and that you don't have anything important to say. If you are stuck in the wake of a disaster the best thing you can do is get yourself to an evacuation camp as fast as you can (assuming they are set up). Everything, and I mean everything, else is secondary.
As for communications. The people coming to help you will bring their own communication that is tried and tested in emergency situation. You pay a huge amount of tax to ensure that these emergency systems are in place and can be deployed in this type of situation.
I'm sure you need computers to organize a relief effort but do you _really_ need a custom live Linux distribution that isn't ready until two weeks after the event? Hardly. This guy would have been better off going down there and shovelling dirt off the streets like the rest of the people actually trying to help.
Technology doesn't help that much in situations like this despite what you migh like to think. If I had a choice between a glass of clean water and an Internet connected PC I know what I would choose any day of the week.
When push comes to shove people seem to do pretty damn well at coordinating and communicating by just talking to each other. Amazingly, this doesn't require computers at all.
Give the guy in the article a pat on the head for trying to help then get on with actually helping people.
WTF. Can you eat and dring Linux now? Did you build a shelter out of Linux CDs? I am sure there are more productive ways you could have helped.
Yes, it's very different. You didn't get any space back when you defragged your drive although it might look like you did on the fancy defrag graphical display because the display doesn't depict reality very well.
FAT 16/32 (not win16/32) drives get fragmented quickly because of the way files are written to the drive in basically a splatter gun fashion with little regard to using the space sensibly. NTFS has a much more inteligent method for writting files to the disk which helps avoid fragmentation. Fragmentation still occurs it's just not as bad as when you use FAT 16/32.
This log based file system mentioned int eh article is a totally different way of laying out the file structure that isn't really comparable. The GP gave a pretty good description of how it works so there's not much point me repeating it here suffice to say that any modified file will be (possibly badly) fragmented. The fragmentation isn't the only cause of slow access times though. Playing back the log is expensive as well.
I agree with almost everything you say except the bit about encryption not being unbreakable. While I admit that in theory all current encryption schemes are breakable it is easy to encrypt something so that it is for all intents and purposes unbreakable without the key. Of course this assumes that there isn't a flaw in the encryption method and that nobody has built a quantum computer naturally. The first could be partially overcome by multiply encrypting the data with different methods - thus requireing a flaw to be found in each.
Anyway that's beside the point. The OP must be on crack or something. If the disaster is so big one of the worlds leading cities is never inhabitable again the guy, his wife and everyone they know is probably dead anyway. What the point planning for a situation you can't hope to live though. You might as well just enjoy the here and now. As for saving your CC numbers - hahahahha = like anyone will accept credit cards. You might be able to barter with food and water but that's about it.
Personally I would take water purification tablets and a 5 * 1 litre bottles of water as my number one thing to pack (more if I have space). After that I would pack low salt high energy food + a small pot of salt (allows you to replace salt when you need it rather than every time you eat). Some sturdy cloth would be useful as it would be easy to rig up a crude filter if you have to drink muddy water (at least the water will be free from bigger bits and the purification tablets will see to the rest - last resort though as "purified" water is horrible). A few boxes of matches sealed in plastic bags would be good as well as a really big coat. And finally, an assortment of large sturdy knives and a hand axe. No where in my list of essentials would I include a USB flash drive.
I already have this system and it works great. It's called NFS. Just NFS mount your home directory to the server and away you go. With the right security you could even do it over the Internet. Ok it means you still have to have fat clients but then you would probably still need a fat client for a broswer based office suite. Of course if everything is done on the server side including rendering then anything that can run VNC will do but the lag would make it unuseable IMHO.
And you think your employer would let you write personal documents while at work sitting at their computer using their LAN and their bandwidth?
As for them being expensive. Yes they are fairly expensive but what are you doing with it? If you want the "latest and greatest" and you want to play games on it then yes it's going to be expensive. If you want to edit a few office documents (which lets face it is what you would be able to do with the proposed web interface) then you aren't looking at that much.
The problems you mention have, I'm sure, been met by every software developer on the planet however that doesn't necessarly mean that the solution used (just changing the code without updating the spec) is the correct solution. I would argue that the correct solution is to make it cheaper (in terms of time) to update the spec. If a small error is found in the spec that is unlikely (in the developers opinion) to impact the rest of the project it shouldn't take more than a few moments for an update and sign off. The problem with not updating the spec till the end is that occasionaly a change will be made that will affect the system in ways that the original discoverer won't realize and nobody but the developer will know about it. Before you know it a million CDs have been pressed that are all useless (I've seen someing like this happen and I nearly fell off my chair laughing as the team that had screwed up blame stormed each other for a week).
I'm not sure all of CS is akin to maths some is closer to engineering IMHO. Having said that I don't think CS is a science. Science to my mind discovers things about the universe around us. This description perfectly fits physics, chemistry and biology as well as their off shoots such as astronomy. CS on the other hand hasn't told us one single truth about the universe. Hence it is not science. It has, however, applied the truths we have discovered about the universe which oddly enough is the definition of engineering. CS just jumped on the science bandwagon because it got more funding / sounded better.
If nothing else comments like this are ammunition for the people who dislike / want to crush Linux (and OSS in general). While I know from experience that the kernel is a quality piece of software and highly reliable if I was new to Linux and considering moving my company over to it comments like this would scare me. It's not that a spec necessarly improves the quality of the software it just improves confidence that the people writting it have a clue about what they hope to acheive.
I, too, didn't believe in writting specs when I was in college. Most of the projects I worked on were either loner affairs or the group was very small so communication was good. When I got into the commercial world though it was a very different ball game. After working on a couple of projects that failed horribly because half the team was confused about what it was supposed to be doing I realized that a spec is a very useful tool.
In my experience the better developers didn't need the spec as much as the poorer developers. The good developers almost understood without words what the other good developers would do in a given situation. The problem was no one could predict what the poorer developers would do in a given situation. This led to large chunks of the system not working / intergrating properly (I freely admit there were other serious management problems on these projecs as well) and needing huge amounts of resources to bring them back on track.
Later projects where there was a spec (even quite an informal spec) produced a better system in less time with fewer resources. I know this sounds like the same old pap that is dished up to every CS student but it really does work on non-trivial projects.
I certainly believe that the spec can be taken to far though. I have seen some projects never even get off the ground for the want of a quick hacked together bit of proof of concept code. The secret is in hitting that fine line between anarchy and unanarchy (there is no good single word antonym for anarchy so I propose unanarchy).
Perhaps the kernel only has uber leet hackers working on it. Somehow I doubt that though.