Bingo. The last estimate I saw when searching earlier says the cost for a manned repair mission is $500 million now.
NASA doesn't intend to bring any shuttle down again without an external inspection of their wing surfaces before reentry. From now on their intent is to dock with the ISS, inspect the shuttle exterior then undock and deorbit. Servicing the Hubble now requires a trip to the ISS and unfortunately those two are too far apart for that to happen (unless NASA changes its new rules, which is unlikely, but possible). Thus the dilemma, and the talk of a robotic mission. A robotic repair mission would be difficult, but a robotic deorbit mission, where the robot simply grabs Hubble then takes a swan dive to the atmosphere would be relatively cheap because of the simple requirements of the robot.
While Infrared light may generate alternate avenues of science, humans dont see in infrared.
Did you really think all those Hubble images were raw images fresh from the scope? No they were all computer enhanced, just like theIRimagesfromIRscopesare.
HUMANS DON'T NEED TO SEE IN INFRARED, ONLY THE SCOPE DOES. jeesh.
PS: It's not an "alternative avenue", its the primary avenue where most scientists want to go anyway.
Repair missions were always part of Hubble's plan from the beginning. What complicated everything were the 2 shuttle tragedies, and the subsequent escalation of cost in operating the remaining shuttles (and the first repair mission occurring much earlier than planned because of the mirror fubar).
The JWST, like the Spitzer Telescope(*) that's already up there (and producing fantastic images - search for its website) will be designed with redundancy in mind as its now obvious that repair missions can't be counted on. All STs now have to be designed with long-term, hands-off operation in mind.
(*) The Spitzer is IR too, and in a deep Earth-trailing orbit that would make servicing it very difficult too. Its working like a charm, though.
Please, just let my poor analogy Rest In Peace, its taken enough abuse already.:)
the whole cost of the mission to hubble, only the difference between deorbiting and upgrade/reboost is relevant,
Its my understanding that NASA is thinking about an unmanned mission to attach external thrusters to provide a controlled reentry. Such a mission would be a lot cheaper than the 500 million it would cost for a manned repair mission, as it wouldn't involve humans or a shuttle, and its those 2 things which constitute most of the expense. Instead, a smaller robotic payload would be boosted up on a conventional (cheap) rocket.
JWST is for IR, although part of the HST's range does go into the UV, it primarily goal was always the visible light spectrum. The Europeans will (or already have?) be putting up a UV ST to handle that spectrum better than the HST can now.
JWST is designed for IR, because we can see farther into the past in that spectrum. In that sense the JWST was always treated as NASA's follow-on to the HST (always considered by NASA itself as Hubble's replacement, regardless of the scopes working in different spectra), because the driving force for space telescopes has always been the desire to see deeper into the past. If it weren't for delays because of lack of money, the JWST would have been guaranteed to be in orbit before the HST went dark, but alas, our government always treats science as an after-thought, so NASA is always under-funded, and a pawn, or football, in frequent political scrimmages.
the general implication that someone who is paid to do something they love (be it coding or promoting the use of Free software in business[*]) is in it for the money is... unfortunate.
In other situations you'd be correct, but from the beginning one of PJ's implied and sometimes explicit argument was her lack of financial reward for starting and running Groklaw, and regularly making SCO look like idiots. The only ones who are publicly speaking for SCO are paid shills, and on the other side you have PJ who doesn't do it for the money, though there wouldn't be anything wrong if she did, and now that Groklaw is broadening its scope, I hope she does manage to earn something for her effort someday. But with the SCO Affair, motivations are under attack on both sides, and because of how it (Groklaw) all got started it would be something of a minor PR victory for SCO if they could prove PJ isn't a "nobody" as she's often claimed, but some kind of "professional writer" or industry hack who is receiving financial compensation for bashing them so effectively, especially if they could even imply that her compensation is indirectly coming from IBM.
What complicates the question are the breathtaking advances in Earth-based astronomy since the Hubble was conceived. During the 1970s when Hubble was designed, the conventional wisdom was that ground based telescopes would never have the resolution of space telescopes because the atmospheric seeing limited the resolution of ground telescopes. In fact, optical imaging observations of bright sources using speckle interferometry or optical interferometry in the 1980s had far higher resolution than Hubble ever achieved, and microcomputer technology starting in the 1990s allowed for adaptive optics imaging of faint objects.
This means that there is not any need to replace the Hubble to obtain better astronomical imagery in the visible range. The new ground-based telescopes can do the job, and even the most ambitious of them, like the Keck in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, are much less expensive than the Hubble and much more sensitive to near infrared light (although Hubble still has by far the highest sensitivity in the visible regime, and existing ground-based telescopes will never compete with the Hubble deep fields in the visible due to the effects of atmospheric airglow). This naturally is much easier to service and update. For example, the VLT cost was roughly 1/7 of the HST cost, and gave the astronomical community four 8.2 meter telescopes, each with a resolution almost as high as the Hubble, and almost certainly representing better value for money in terms of the science returned.
How is it a smear? There's nothing wrong with making money selling insurance,
No, there is nothing wrong with selling insurance if you're an insurance salesman, but PJ quit precisely because she had nothing to do with the insurance issue going on at OSRM, but people were using her connection to OSRM to imply that she did. That is the smear, that she runs Groklaw with the intention of cashing in on the Linux-is-a-liability FUD. It wasn't ever true before, and certainly hasn't been true in the last 5 months since she quit working for OSRM. But the false implication keeps getting spread, intentionally by SCO, and unintentionally in your case, that she's just in it for the money. Anyone who's read more than a dozen or so of her posts knows that a), she is a true FOSS believer, and b), her credibility/reputation is important to her, hence everything she's done to avoid even looking like a paid shill.
There is no replacement for Hubble's visible-light acuity even in the serious planning stages.
Sigh. That's because we want to move *beyond* visible light to see farther into the past!
Its like this: You've got an old Ford Escort, but you've ordered a new supercharged Ford Mustang GT. Since its a custom order, it'll be a few months before it gets to you. Between now and then, does it make any sense to spend money keeping up the Escort, especially when money is tight?
I'm all for the fascinating pictures we get from Hubble, but the *really* interesting stuff lies in the infrared spectrum, beyond Hubble's sight. That's why IMO, if we can't do both, then we should stop wasting money to keep the Hubble up, and use that money to accelerate its replacement.
the assumption at the core of it is that we're playing a zero-sum, finite-resource game.
As long as we are trapped on this one planet, a finite resource game is *exactly* what it is. Full stop.
The US is a small fraction of the global population yet consumes the biggest chunk of the world's gross product. Bringing everyone else up to that standard would mean an exponential increase in resources consumed and the industrial base to produce the products being consumed. The resources to sustain this for any length of time simply don't exist.
The question many visionaries are wondering is whether humanity can get part of itself off this planet before an exploding population, demanding ever more resources for itself, prevents our escape by forcing all expenditures away from exploration and colonization beyond Earth to maintenance of a ballooning population here on Earth.
"So once everyone has a decent standard of living..."
All 6-7 billion of us at the same time? This planet literally doesn't have the resources to support that. An ugly truth that doesn't get talked about, but its true.
What poor areas?
Just ask the hundreds who (try to) cross the Mexico-US border every day where they're coming from. They aren't all Mexicans.
So once everyone has a decent standard of living birth rates will drop on their own.
Not as long as you have immigration from the poor areas with rising population to the areas with steady population size. Net effect is still an increase.
The US population is expected to grow dramatically, despite it not yet being a poor country... all because of immigration.
You would have to shut down all immigration to have the effect you speak of, and that has political consequences of its own.
This is not a debate about Openness. This is not a debate about Freedom.
Not true. For those on the Free Software side it is *exactly* about Freedom. The problem is the "pragmatists" the ones who are said to have "common sense" are the ones who are blind to the concerns of the other side. Have you read Linus's responses to the allegations brought up in this thread?
Tridge's tool would have been useful if that usage had been sanctioned by BitMover. But since that tool ends up invalidating your right to use BK in the first place, and since that tool can not replace what BK did, then yes, the tool is pointless.
So you have three choices
- don't use the tool (which makes it useless)
- use the tool, but stop using BK (which makes it useless)
- use the tool _and_ use BK, which violates the BK
license
Two useless cases, and one outright license violation.
Now just about any FS person out there will have an enormous problem with this. Why? Because amazingly, Linus had little concern over the freedom of the code/data. Being required to use BK and agree to its license is not even an issue in his mind. In Linus's mind Tridge's tool was pointless because it didn't replace BK, but most FS people, probably beginning with Alan Cox, who refused to use BK from the start, would tell you that the crucial point all along was being able to access the repository code/data of the kernel source code WITHOUT HAVING TO USE BK OR AGREE TO ITS ONEROUS LICENSE (his point #2 above is wrong). In their minds, Tridge's tool is FAR from pointless, its value lies in its ability to retrieve what arguably *belongs* to them without having to agree to terms they find unethical or reprehensible. It was never meant to be a replacement of BK, but something that would allow them to retrieve the data for migration to another SCM when the time came. This concern is not even on Linus's radar, it doesn't occur to him even now.
When Linus chose to start using BK, he wasn't the sole author of the kernel anymore, hundreds of contributors were involved by then, and Linus was well aware that many of them had strong views about BK and that there would be problems in the future. He chose the pragmatic route and used proprietary software for a free software project, indirectly forcing Free Software people to rely on a system for their own Free code that itself wasn't free. Sadly, I have to agree with the one previous poster that had the courage to say the raw truth: if *anyone* is to blame for the mess we have now, its Linus himself, not Tridge. To use the Matrix analogy, Linus created the flaw, or imperfection, in the system, and that made the creation of a "Neo" at some point in the future inevitable. We know RMS saw this coming from the get-go, but if we go back to the LKML archives at the time, I would not be at all surprised if several other Linux developers outside the FS camp didn't end up predicting the coming of Tridge back then too.
I am not trying to denigrate Linus, far from it, you have to respect his enormous programming skills, but when it comes to the larger issues of the use of software in our society, its RMS and Moglen that I listen to, not Linus, because Linus doesn't really "get it". He's clearly "Open Source", and not "Free Software", and that's OK really, but he was working with a lot of FS people back then, so for a guy famous for being able to herd cats, he simply did not (and seemingly still doesn't) understand half of his "cats" well enough to realize that the use of BK was guarantteed to be a disaster in the making.
This isn't really worth an argument now, and I'm not here to bash Linus, and especially not to open up the FS vs OS fight again, but please stop bashing Tridge (not to the parent, but many previous posts), there is enough blame to go around on this one. Lets move on.
Indeed, the x86 clones that are the most popular deployment platform for linux wouldn't exist at all
And all the AMD fanboys like myself should get down on our knees and be thankful that Advanced Micro Devices decided to do more than just be an unknown chip making company producing identical copies of The Monopoly's CPUs under contract, but had the sheer audacity to think they could clone The Monopoly's product's functionality and and actually do it *better*. The pundits laughed, every one said they'll be destroyed in litigation with The Monopoly, but now my machine is running a 64-bit CPU that cost roughly as much as Intel's 32bit chips, and Intel's CPUs today would be slower, hotter, still 32bit, and more expensive if not for AMD.
Reverse Engineering within the defined limits is necessary for Competition, Competition is GOOD, ergo, Reverse Engineering is GOOD.
Somewhere in the Far East a Sake drinker has heard of this and thought "Hmmm, getting drunk on the alcohol from the fermented rice and then getting stoned on the drugs the rice makes" then.... [ring, ring]... "Yes, I'm calling about your genetically modified rice, do you accept mail-orders with overseas destinations? These would be *large* orders, definitely worth your while..."
Holding Fox as a whole responsible for bias in an opinion show is silly.
Agreed. About the only thing sillier than that would be an obviously biased network calling itself "fair and balanced" every 3 minutes through those viciously conservative opinion shows. Oh wait...
(Sorry, everyone besides Fox's Fanboys knows their biased. What angers so many is that they constantly claim not to be what they obviously are, and that indicates a level of arrogance that many find distasteful.)
From reading this thread I get the impression a lot of people simply don't realize that Linux kernel development is fundamentally different from other, typical software projects. It needs an extremely distributed, decentralized SCM because it (the Linux kernel) is perhaps the ultimate example of a distributed, decentralized software project we have so far. Linus couldn't scale, so he had to decentralize, but there simply didn't exist anything that could let him hand off control to sub-components while still giving him the power of oversight and the ability to do fine-grained control over changesets. Except Bitkeeper. Linus made his choice out of pragmatic necessity at the time.
The fact that 3 years later, Linus still can't just use an existing SCM, but has to start building a toolset of his own (git) to do what he needs to be able to do, should be a clue to all the people asking "what about subversion?" that what Linus needs is something most of the rest of us DON'T NEED. For most of us, SCMs based on centralized repositories is a perfectly fine solution for our SCM needs, it works even for large (in LOC terms) projects. Linux though is large not only in terms of LOC, its also huge in terms of the number of contributors and maintainers of its various sub-systems.
The fact is, is that what Linus needs is unusual and not needed by most of the rest of the software development world. This explains why the FOSS community hasn't yet answered this need, because this 'need' is still relatively rare. When it comes to source code management, one size does not fit all. Just look at the different posts in this thread about different SCM preferences. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the top level Linux kernel developers, 5 years from now, using a custom built SCM system running as a high-level layer over the usual suspects like Subversion, CVS, or whatever. The point is, they're needs are so unusual, a custom solution to their problem might very well end up being what they come up with.
What's interesting is what comes after that. How's this for irony: Larry cuts off Linus's use of Bitkeeper because some other OSDL employee just happens to be working on a competitor to Bitkeeper in his spare time. Linus, because of need and desperation, does what he does best, he throws his own considerable intellectual capacity at the problem and starts hacking away at his own solution. He comes up with something interesting, and unlike Larry, Linus's creation is open-source, thus some of the other kernel developers get interested, and they start hacking on Linus's creation. At first, for a year or two, only Linus and a few top-level (ring 0) developers work on and use it. But in time, the thing gets better and better because its baptism under fire is being used to control the high level source code management for one of the most complex and extremely distributed software projects in existence. It reaches critical mass and some other distributed projects start looking at it as a way to handle their needs, other hackers join in from outside the kernel group. The thing snowballs, and in 4-6 years, the very thing Larry is trying to avoid by cutting OSDL and Linus off at the knees, a direct and serious competitor to Bitkeeper, comes into being precisely *because* he cut Linus off at the knees. Larry ends up creating the very thing he believes he's avoiding.:)
Instead of one obscure OSDL developer working part-time on a competitor, he's now managed to get several of OSDL's best talent, starting with Linus himself, working on a Bitkeeper competitor full time to fill the void left by Larry taking Bitkeeper away from them! As the beer commercial says: BRILLIANT!:)
In another decade or so, gcc will be obsolete if it doesnt continue advancing. RMS is just punishing everyone who uses gcc, and risking the possibility that gcc gets overtaken by some other compiler system. The new IR representation and optimization framework called tree-ssa in GCC is already in LLVM, its the feature LLVM was designed around, and being written in OO C++, LLVM is easier to work with. And LLVM isnt the only thing cooking out there... By keeping his head stuck in the sand, RMS is just hurting GCC.
One of Debians AMD64 distros is using gcc4.0 now. One is called pure64 using gcc3.3/3.4, and the other was unfortunately called gcc3.4 when it was begun, which has now using gcc4.0.
Now for Debian *stable*, we may be talking awhile...:)
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Bingo. The last estimate I saw when searching earlier says the cost for a manned repair mission is $500 million now.
NASA doesn't intend to bring any shuttle down again without an external inspection of their wing surfaces before reentry. From now on their intent is to dock with the ISS, inspect the shuttle exterior then undock and deorbit. Servicing the Hubble now requires a trip to the ISS and unfortunately those two are too far apart for that to happen (unless NASA changes its new rules, which is unlikely, but possible). Thus the dilemma, and the talk of a robotic mission. A robotic repair mission would be difficult, but a robotic deorbit mission, where the robot simply grabs Hubble then takes a swan dive to the atmosphere would be relatively cheap because of the simple requirements of the robot.
Did you really think all those Hubble images were raw images fresh from the scope? No they were all computer enhanced, just like the IR images from IR scopes are.
HUMANS DON'T NEED TO SEE IN INFRARED, ONLY THE SCOPE DOES. jeesh.
PS: It's not an "alternative avenue", its the primary avenue where most scientists want to go anyway.
Repair missions were always part of Hubble's plan from the beginning. What complicated everything were the 2 shuttle tragedies, and the subsequent escalation of cost in operating the remaining shuttles (and the first repair mission occurring much earlier than planned because of the mirror fubar).
The JWST, like the Spitzer Telescope(*) that's already up there (and producing fantastic images - search for its website) will be designed with redundancy in mind as its now obvious that repair missions can't be counted on. All STs now have to be designed with long-term, hands-off operation in mind.
(*) The Spitzer is IR too, and in a deep Earth-trailing orbit that would make servicing it very difficult too. Its working like a charm, though.
Please, just let my poor analogy Rest In Peace, its taken enough abuse already.
Its my understanding that NASA is thinking about an unmanned mission to attach external thrusters to provide a controlled reentry. Such a mission would be a lot cheaper than the 500 million it would cost for a manned repair mission, as it wouldn't involve humans or a shuttle, and its those 2 things which constitute most of the expense. Instead, a smaller robotic payload would be boosted up on a conventional (cheap) rocket.
JWST is for IR, although part of the HST's range does go into the UV, it primarily goal was always the visible light spectrum. The Europeans will (or already have?) be putting up a UV ST to handle that spectrum better than the HST can now.
JWST is designed for IR, because we can see farther into the past in that spectrum. In that sense the JWST was always treated as NASA's follow-on to the HST (always considered by NASA itself as Hubble's replacement, regardless of the scopes working in different spectra), because the driving force for space telescopes has always been the desire to see deeper into the past. If it weren't for delays because of lack of money, the JWST would have been guaranteed to be in orbit before the HST went dark, but alas, our government always treats science as an after-thought, so NASA is always under-funded, and a pawn, or football, in frequent political scrimmages.
In other situations you'd be correct, but from the beginning one of PJ's implied and sometimes explicit argument was her lack of financial reward for starting and running Groklaw, and regularly making SCO look like idiots. The only ones who are publicly speaking for SCO are paid shills, and on the other side you have PJ who doesn't do it for the money, though there wouldn't be anything wrong if she did, and now that Groklaw is broadening its scope, I hope she does manage to earn something for her effort someday. But with the SCO Affair, motivations are under attack on both sides, and because of how it (Groklaw) all got started it would be something of a minor PR victory for SCO if they could prove PJ isn't a "nobody" as she's often claimed, but some kind of "professional writer" or industry hack who is receiving financial compensation for bashing them so effectively, especially if they could even imply that her compensation is indirectly coming from IBM.
Except that it isn't our only "transportation" now.
From Hubble's Wikipedia entry:
No, there is nothing wrong with selling insurance if you're an insurance salesman, but PJ quit precisely because she had nothing to do with the insurance issue going on at OSRM, but people were using her connection to OSRM to imply that she did. That is the smear, that she runs Groklaw with the intention of cashing in on the Linux-is-a-liability FUD. It wasn't ever true before, and certainly hasn't been true in the last 5 months since she quit working for OSRM. But the false implication keeps getting spread, intentionally by SCO, and unintentionally in your case, that she's just in it for the money. Anyone who's read more than a dozen or so of her posts knows that a), she is a true FOSS believer, and b), her credibility/reputation is important to her, hence everything she's done to avoid even looking like a paid shill.
Why don't we talk about the Open Source zealots that constantly bash Stallman on
One man's zealot is another man's visionary... *and* vice versa.
Sigh. That's because we want to move *beyond* visible light to see farther into the past!
Its like this: You've got an old Ford Escort, but you've ordered a new supercharged Ford Mustang GT. Since its a custom order, it'll be a few months before it gets to you. Between now and then, does it make any sense to spend money keeping up the Escort, especially when money is tight?
I'm all for the fascinating pictures we get from Hubble, but the *really* interesting stuff lies in the infrared spectrum, beyond Hubble's sight. That's why IMO, if we can't do both, then we should stop wasting money to keep the Hubble up, and use that money to accelerate its replacement.
As long as we are trapped on this one planet, a finite resource game is *exactly* what it is. Full stop.
The US is a small fraction of the global population yet consumes the biggest chunk of the world's gross product. Bringing everyone else up to that standard would mean an exponential increase in resources consumed and the industrial base to produce the products being consumed. The resources to sustain this for any length of time simply don't exist.
The question many visionaries are wondering is whether humanity can get part of itself off this planet before an exploding population, demanding ever more resources for itself, prevents our escape by forcing all expenditures away from exploration and colonization beyond Earth to maintenance of a ballooning population here on Earth.
All 6-7 billion of us at the same time? This planet literally doesn't have the resources to support that. An ugly truth that doesn't get talked about, but its true.
Just ask the hundreds who (try to) cross the Mexico-US border every day where they're coming from. They aren't all Mexicans.
Not as long as you have immigration from the poor areas with rising population to the areas with steady population size. Net effect is still an increase.
The US population is expected to grow dramatically, despite it not yet being a poor country... all because of immigration.
You would have to shut down all immigration to have the effect you speak of, and that has political consequences of its own.
"But we do assume the Democrats would if they could."
Oh yea, that's fair and balanced. Hehe.
Not true. For those on the Free Software side it is *exactly* about Freedom. The problem is the "pragmatists" the ones who are said to have "common sense" are the ones who are blind to the concerns of the other side. Have you read Linus's responses to the allegations brought up in this thread?
Look here.
In one of the responses, Linus says:
Now just about any FS person out there will have an enormous problem with this. Why? Because amazingly, Linus had little concern over the freedom of the code/data. Being required to use BK and agree to its license is not even an issue in his mind. In Linus's mind Tridge's tool was pointless because it didn't replace BK, but most FS people, probably beginning with Alan Cox, who refused to use BK from the start, would tell you that the crucial point all along was being able to access the repository code/data of the kernel source code WITHOUT HAVING TO USE BK OR AGREE TO ITS ONEROUS LICENSE (his point #2 above is wrong). In their minds, Tridge's tool is FAR from pointless, its value lies in its ability to retrieve what arguably *belongs* to them without having to agree to terms they find unethical or reprehensible. It was never meant to be a replacement of BK, but something that would allow them to retrieve the data for migration to another SCM when the time came. This concern is not even on Linus's radar, it doesn't occur to him even now.
When Linus chose to start using BK, he wasn't the sole author of the kernel anymore, hundreds of contributors were involved by then, and Linus was well aware that many of them had strong views about BK and that there would be problems in the future. He chose the pragmatic route and used proprietary software for a free software project, indirectly forcing Free Software people to rely on a system for their own Free code that itself wasn't free. Sadly, I have to agree with the one previous poster that had the courage to say the raw truth: if *anyone* is to blame for the mess we have now, its Linus himself, not Tridge. To use the Matrix analogy, Linus created the flaw, or imperfection, in the system, and that made the creation of a "Neo" at some point in the future inevitable. We know RMS saw this coming from the get-go, but if we go back to the LKML archives at the time, I would not be at all surprised if several other Linux developers outside the FS camp didn't end up predicting the coming of Tridge back then too.
I am not trying to denigrate Linus, far from it, you have to respect his enormous programming skills, but when it comes to the larger issues of the use of software in our society, its RMS and Moglen that I listen to, not Linus, because Linus doesn't really "get it". He's clearly "Open Source", and not "Free Software", and that's OK really, but he was working with a lot of FS people back then, so for a guy famous for being able to herd cats, he simply did not (and seemingly still doesn't) understand half of his "cats" well enough to realize that the use of BK was guarantteed to be a disaster in the making.
This isn't really worth an argument now, and I'm not here to bash Linus, and especially not to open up the FS vs OS fight again, but please stop bashing Tridge (not to the parent, but many previous posts), there is enough blame to go around on this one. Lets move on.
Modding the article itself? Careful, heresy like that could get *you* modded down by the Powers That Be. :) (The suggestion has come up before)
Nope, just a band-aid over a gaping wound.
Now its finally fixed.
Parent should be +5, someone with points help out here.
And all the AMD fanboys like myself should get down on our knees and be thankful that Advanced Micro Devices decided to do more than just be an unknown chip making company producing identical copies of The Monopoly's CPUs under contract, but had the sheer audacity to think they could clone The Monopoly's product's functionality and and actually do it *better*. The pundits laughed, every one said they'll be destroyed in litigation with The Monopoly, but now my machine is running a 64-bit CPU that cost roughly as much as Intel's 32bit chips, and Intel's CPUs today would be slower, hotter, still 32bit, and more expensive if not for AMD.
Reverse Engineering within the defined limits is necessary for Competition, Competition is GOOD, ergo, Reverse Engineering is GOOD.
Somewhere in the Far East a Sake drinker has heard of this and thought "Hmmm, getting drunk on the alcohol from the fermented rice and then getting stoned on the drugs the rice makes" then .... [ring, ring] ... "Yes, I'm calling about your genetically modified rice, do you accept mail-orders with overseas destinations? These would be *large* orders, definitely worth your while..."
Agreed. About the only thing sillier than that would be an obviously biased network calling itself "fair and balanced" every 3 minutes through those viciously conservative opinion shows. Oh wait...
(Sorry, everyone besides Fox's Fanboys knows their biased. What angers so many is that they constantly claim not to be what they obviously are, and that indicates a level of arrogance that many find distasteful.)
None.
From reading this thread I get the impression a lot of people simply don't realize that Linux kernel development is fundamentally different from other, typical software projects. It needs an extremely distributed, decentralized SCM because it (the Linux kernel) is perhaps the ultimate example of a distributed, decentralized software project we have so far. Linus couldn't scale, so he had to decentralize, but there simply didn't exist anything that could let him hand off control to sub-components while still giving him the power of oversight and the ability to do fine-grained control over changesets. Except Bitkeeper. Linus made his choice out of pragmatic necessity at the time.
The fact that 3 years later, Linus still can't just use an existing SCM, but has to start building a toolset of his own (git) to do what he needs to be able to do, should be a clue to all the people asking "what about subversion?" that what Linus needs is something most of the rest of us DON'T NEED. For most of us, SCMs based on centralized repositories is a perfectly fine solution for our SCM needs, it works even for large (in LOC terms) projects. Linux though is large not only in terms of LOC, its also huge in terms of the number of contributors and maintainers of its various sub-systems.
The fact is, is that what Linus needs is unusual and not needed by most of the rest of the software development world. This explains why the FOSS community hasn't yet answered this need, because this 'need' is still relatively rare. When it comes to source code management, one size does not fit all. Just look at the different posts in this thread about different SCM preferences. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the top level Linux kernel developers, 5 years from now, using a custom built SCM system running as a high-level layer over the usual suspects like Subversion, CVS, or whatever. The point is, they're needs are so unusual, a custom solution to their problem might very well end up being what they come up with.
What's interesting is what comes after that. How's this for irony: Larry cuts off Linus's use of Bitkeeper because some other OSDL employee just happens to be working on a competitor to Bitkeeper in his spare time. Linus, because of need and desperation, does what he does best, he throws his own considerable intellectual capacity at the problem and starts hacking away at his own solution. He comes up with something interesting, and unlike Larry, Linus's creation is open-source, thus some of the other kernel developers get interested, and they start hacking on Linus's creation. At first, for a year or two, only Linus and a few top-level (ring 0) developers work on and use it. But in time, the thing gets better and better because its baptism under fire is being used to control the high level source code management for one of the most complex and extremely distributed software projects in existence. It reaches critical mass and some other distributed projects start looking at it as a way to handle their needs, other hackers join in from outside the kernel group. The thing snowballs, and in 4-6 years, the very thing Larry is trying to avoid by cutting OSDL and Linus off at the knees, a direct and serious competitor to Bitkeeper, comes into being precisely *because* he cut Linus off at the knees. Larry ends up creating the very thing he believes he's avoiding.
Instead of one obscure OSDL developer working part-time on a competitor, he's now managed to get several of OSDL's best talent, starting with Linus himself, working on a Bitkeeper competitor full time to fill the void left by Larry taking Bitkeeper away from them! As the beer commercial says: BRILLIANT!
In another decade or so, when
In another decade or so, gcc will be obsolete if it doesnt continue advancing. RMS is just punishing everyone who uses gcc, and risking the possibility that gcc gets overtaken by some other compiler system. The new IR representation and optimization framework called tree-ssa in GCC is already in LLVM, its the feature LLVM was designed around, and being written in OO C++, LLVM is easier to work with. And LLVM isnt the only thing cooking out there... By keeping his head stuck in the sand, RMS is just hurting GCC.
One of Debians AMD64 distros is using gcc4.0 now. One is called pure64 using gcc3.3/3.4, and the other was unfortunately called gcc3.4 when it was begun, which has now using gcc4.0.
:)
Now for Debian *stable*, we may be talking awhile...
You know, you hard-core gamers really scare me sometimes.