I work in Silicon Valley and have worked at several startups. I am also white. I am also the minority. In most of the companies where I have worked, the majority of the software people have been Indian or Asian. Other jobs in the companies seem to be predominantly white/American. Why do I think this is? Well, our education system and values are a good start. We have been trying to grow the company and have several head count to fill. Most candidates coming in the door are also Indian or Asian, have at *minimum* a Master's degree or PhD, and are very driven to succeed. We pick candidates solely based on their skill sets. If a green girl with tentacles came into the office and was a good technical and business culture fit, we would hire them. Want to get more African-American and Latinos in our doors? Make them better candidates. Period.
I am getting close to 40 (geez, really?) and have had no problem. Could it be that the people complaining simply don't have the skills necessary to compete? I think that it is more that these 20-year-olds turned CTO/CIO/CEO simply have no clue what they're doing, and are hiring people that are style over substance. However, I could be wrong. After all, if you cannot use the newest up-and-coming technology, what do you have to offer, anyway?
Obama? Pfft... it's the government officials that we *didn't* vote for that should scare you.
While I agree with you, I think the point isn't that snatching people up off the streets happens. It is that allowing things like this just brings us one step closer to that reality.
Funny enough, there was a press release put out today talking about how the 365 Main facility had given 100% uptime over the past 2 years. Yes, 100% uptime for a facility is very possible. All it needs is to stay online and providing power and cooling.
Desktop users are fickle... and that's why Linux has failed on the desktop. However, Ubuntu has made incredible progress on this front.
I think that you hit the nail right on the head here. Two years ago, Gentoo Linux was the desktop distribution for many people. Now it is Ubuntu. I figure in another year or so, people will start shifting to some other distribution. Then again, I even split "desktop" into "home" and "enterprise" since they have very different goals and very different needs. I'd much rather win the enterprise desktop market than the home desktop market, even though the latter is likely much larger these days.
As I am sure you can guess, I'll answer with a simple answer, which likely means the most up front work but also the best capabilities. You'll want to build one yourself. This doesn't mean that you have to do all the work. As an example, I'll (obviously) use Gentoo. You install Gentoo and build your Gentoo-based distribution with exactly what you want in it. Since Gentoo is source-based to begin with, it should be easy to transition to your actual platform. Of course you won't want a C compiler and such on your actual platform, you do that on your development systems. This is really how most embedded Linux is done, with a development machine building the customized distribution for the actual release platform. I'll be honest and say that my experience with other embedded Linux is pretty much nil, but Gentoo will do what you want, and we have great community support. The nice thing about using Gentoo is it is basically the same thing as the normal distribution, and we support the platforms used for most embedded devices. Of course, you'll want to use what suits your needs best.
When I was first getting into Linux, I picked specific things that I wanted to learn to do, and focused on those. How do I setup a DNS server? RADIUS? DHCP? MySQL? I find it a bit easier if you have a goal set when trying to learn, rather than just trying to "learn more" about the system. During the course of working on these services, you'll learn more about the system. The secret is to not try to do the simplest installation/setup you can do, but the most interesting. Don't just setup RADIUS, setup RADIUS with a MySQL back-end. You'll quickly learn how different parts of different software operate and will get a better grasp of how things work. The basics really are the most fundamental thing to learn, since everything builds on them and most things in Linux are a combination of smaller, simpler tasks. For example, setting up a LAMP server is really, 4 tasks: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Of course, that's a bit oversimplified, but you get the idea.
The distribution doesn't matter. Your best method is to try as many as you can that are fundamentally different. Don't try Debian and Ubuntu and Knoppix. Try Ubuntu and Red Hat and Gentoo. Use systems that are as different from each other as you can, and you'll start quickly picking up on the differences and the similarities. This is what will make you a coveted administrator, since your skill set will be varied and you'll be well-versed in working in unfamiliar territory and good at resolving issues where you don't already know the answer. Also, definitely look into learning bash, and probably perl, too. You don't need to be an expert on them, but you'll definitely want to be familiar with them and be comfortable with them if you ever decide to become a Linux Administrator.
I hope this helps and welcome to the wonderful world of Linux.
What they did was pretty nefarious. Transgaming said that they would take down their CVS repository for the open source portions of WineX (way before the Cedega days) if we did not remove the ebuild from the tree. I would like to mention that Gentoo was not packaging a single file from Transgaming, and was using a publicly accessible CVS repository. Transgaming went to sar as to tell us that this hurt their business model. Rather than fight with a company that we (the Games team, at the time) thought was bad for the gaming industry, the ebuild was removed from the tree.
I have several times offered to help document open source software, but my offer has always been refused. Apparently there is a strong attachment to doing things the old way. Apparently there is a feeling that someone who writes the documentation will get too much credit, even though I did not expect to have my name on what I wrote.
Well, Gentoo is always looking for good documentation people. Gentoo prides itself on having top-notch documentation. This is only possible by having good people. If you're really interested in helping out, you should contact the Gentoo Documentation Project and see about joining up. Even if you don't feel like joining the project, we always accept contributions from the community. There's also the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter if that is more your style.
I gladly leave the picking up of unsatisfied Windows users to other flavors of Linux, I myself prefer to stick with Gentoo and wish that all the developers at Gentoo would realize that Gentoo just isn't and is not supposed to become an "click and go" OS.
Says who? Gentoo's goals are fairly well-aligned with making things simpler, so long as flexibility is not sacrificed for it.
It is my personal opinion that if you have to do anything on the command line, the software/OS has failed. Of course, that means that all operating systems out there fail in my eyes. Well, they do. Computers are complex, but the interface doesn't have to be complex. Gentoo will never likely become an OS that removes the ability for power users to use it as they wish, since that is one of the fundamental advantages of Gentoo, but it is very likely going to continue moving towards a more simple default installation. The goal is to eventually allow people to never need to drop to the command line to perform at least the most common tasks. Power users will always have the option to be CLI junkies. Of course, I'm referring to a user-oriented OS, not a server OS. Gentoo can be used for both, and only the user side is being geared towards making things more simplified and graphical. We would like to simplify the server side, as well, but only so far as to make management of Gentoo servers easier for the administrator without removing flexibility.
If you're interested in the server side of Gentoo, check out the SCIRE project.
1: Put gentoo cd in drive 2: wade through the initial setup in the voluminous manual Uhh... Except that there's an Installer now, so everything else you've said here is complete and utter crap.
What I also find funny is that the only arguments that people can give against Gentoo is that the install takes a long time, which has not been the case since around 2003, when Gentoo started the GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) method of installation. Sure, you can do a stage1 installation and take days building your system if you have nothing better to do or are simply misinformed, but the recommended installation method is using the Installer, which takes somewhere around 20 minutes to have a complete GNOME workstation up and running for me.
When Daniel was around, Gentoo also only had about 80 developers and less than 30,000 files in the tree. The package count was less than 1/4 what it is now. The bugs were still less than 25,000. There were horrible cliques within the distribution... tons of infighting. Daniel stopped doing Gentoo development long before he actually left the distribution. People seem to have this starry-eyed memory of when Daniel was around. Trust me, It wasn't a cake walk by any stretch of the imagination. While admittedly things have gotten worse of late, Daniel's presence had little to do with it. I think we would be in a similar situation had he not left. Remember that one of the reasons for his leaving was he got burnt out due to his inability to continue to manage the ever-growing distribution by himself. When he left the first time, it had already been a good year or so without much input from Daniel on anything regarding the direction of the distribution. Daniel's leaving the project didn't coincide with his reduced contributions, at all.
The biggest problem with the distribution is we are going through massive growing pains. Until recently, the leaders of the distribution were afraid to do much, for fear of upsetting developers. We've now started to realize that it's OK to upset a developer or two every now and then and that we need to work towards making the distribution better as a whole. We have been throwing around some ideas for some time and are working towards implementing them. These things take some time. Until then, we'll probably see a bit more of this sort of drivel being posted by all sorts of people. We need to get back to doing what we do best, making a kick ass distribution of Linux.
It isn't the optimizations. Anyone who tells you that likely doesn't know much about Gentoo or its motivations. What makes Gentoo nice is the flexibility and customization capabilities that are available out of the box. You don't compile on Gentoo so you get improved performance. That rarely happens, if ever. You compile on Gentoo so your packages are compiled the way that you want them, with the features you want, and none of the features you don't want.
There's still talks of using sqlite for this. Something that people tend to forget is that a file-system *is* just a database. It's just a certain kind of database. The whole "a database is faster" line if reasoning simply isn't true... certain database types and configurations are faster for certain workloads. Nobody has taken the time to find out what sort of configuration is really optimal for the repository. All we really have are some semi-working implementations and some half-baked theories and anecdotal evidence.
Some hard numbers and good testing methodologies is what we really need to replace the back-end.
You can have your tree on a squashfs, which works quite similarly, is supported by the kernel (gentoo-sources, anyway) and doesn't require additional dependencies for portage. I've also found tmpfs to work quite well, but many people won't have the RAM for it. Besides that, there are several implementations about for other back-ends for the repository for portage. It's just that none have been polished and adopted officially.
As for some space savings, we're switching to Manifest2, which removes *all* of the digest-* files from the tree, for 2007.0's release. This doesn't mean you'll need to install 2007.0, it just means we'll be enabling it by default along with the release. This saves a good portion of time and removes a huge number of small files from the tree.
I think the author's choice of the word "dumb terminal" is unfortunate, as these sorts of systems are anything but dumb. Most people think of these as a "thin client" instead these days. However, the author is spot on about how these can drastically reduce the cost of a system. One company that I have done work for decided to start using their old systems as thin clients. I built a custom software set for them. The hardware platform was old Dell Optiplex GX1 machines, with the hard drives removed. The machines boot solely off the network, load Linux, then connect to the appropriate resource. This has saved the company a ton of money, not only in the support costs required to maintain these machines, but also in the disposal of this aging hardware and the savings of not having to replace the machines with newer ones.
For a company just starting out, buying thin client hardware is a good investment. It shouldn't need updating of any kind, and most hardware is field-programmable anyway.
The problem with Gentoo is that Gentoo users assume that most people care about configuration options. They assume that people want the most up-to-date packages. They assume that there's no reason to have stable, long-term supported releases.
Huh? We assume no such thing. In fact, we really don't care what "most people" want, at all. We make no assumptions about support. It is Gentoo detractors who tend to claim that we do. We don't. What we care about is making Gentoo. If Gentoo doesn't fit your needs, don't friggin' use it! Trust me, you won't hurt our feelings. If you think Debian is better, use it. If you think Windows is better, use it. You aren't harming us in any way by using what you feel is the best tool for the job. In fact, that is exactly what we try to give to our users. We give them a set of tools to allow them to build what they want.
I think the biggest issue is that people seem to have this closed-minded view of software and Gentoo. They're stuck in this way of thinking that lends towards doing what the vendor tells you to do. They run Red Hat. They run Debian. They don't think that you can build what you want. Gentoo provides the tools to do just that. For many of my clients, I have built custom Gentoo-based distributions. What they get themselves is slightly different than Gentoo. They get pre-compiled packages. They get a very nice Internet-based update system for these packages. They don't jump into make.conf, at all. They don't need to make these kind of changes. Instead, I have built a custom distribution with the software that the customer wants on it. They install it from CD, and it has exactly what they want on it and nothing else. Gentoo is the tool that builds this system. I am using Gentoo as it was intended, to build exactly what I want. People tend to forget that it is impossible to make something that fits every need. Rather than try to do so, like other distributions do, we instead provide the tools to allow you to build it on your own. It's a completely different philosophy, which is why I understand that so many people simply don't get it.
Have you ever used Gentoo? I will tell you that it is, in fact, the exact opposite. Packages will remain in our testing branch until the package maintainers or users request it become stable. At that point, it is tested by the various architecture teams and stabilized on each architecture individually based on the testing. Packages are never automatically promoted to stable.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in Silicon Valley and have worked at several startups. I am also white. I am also the minority. In most of the companies where I have worked, the majority of the software people have been Indian or Asian. Other jobs in the companies seem to be predominantly white/American. Why do I think this is? Well, our education system and values are a good start. We have been trying to grow the company and have several head count to fill. Most candidates coming in the door are also Indian or Asian, have at *minimum* a Master's degree or PhD, and are very driven to succeed. We pick candidates solely based on their skill sets. If a green girl with tentacles came into the office and was a good technical and business culture fit, we would hire them. Want to get more African-American and Latinos in our doors? Make them better candidates. Period.
I work for a 28-person startup and we're pretty evenly distributed across the board.
Sounds like somebody got turned down by Facebook...
I am getting close to 40 (geez, really?) and have had no problem. Could it be that the people complaining simply don't have the skills necessary to compete? I think that it is more that these 20-year-olds turned CTO/CIO/CEO simply have no clue what they're doing, and are hiring people that are style over substance. However, I could be wrong. After all, if you cannot use the newest up-and-coming technology, what do you have to offer, anyway?
Obama? Pfft... it's the government officials that we *didn't* vote for that should scare you. While I agree with you, I think the point isn't that snatching people up off the streets happens. It is that allowing things like this just brings us one step closer to that reality.
It starts with.. "Hold my beer"
Well, I guess that it's a good thing that hardly anybody has signed up!
Absolutely.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan/Contact:
Why build one device, when you can build two for twice the cost?
Funny enough, there was a press release put out today talking about how the 365 Main facility had given 100% uptime over the past 2 years. Yes, 100% uptime for a facility is very possible. All it needs is to stay online and providing power and cooling.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/ 07/24/BAG9NR67253.DTL/
I think that you hit the nail right on the head here. Two years ago, Gentoo Linux was the desktop distribution for many people. Now it is Ubuntu. I figure in another year or so, people will start shifting to some other distribution. Then again, I even split "desktop" into "home" and "enterprise" since they have very different goals and very different needs. I'd much rather win the enterprise desktop market than the home desktop market, even though the latter is likely much larger these days.
As I am sure you can guess, I'll answer with a simple answer, which likely means the most up front work but also the best capabilities. You'll want to build one yourself. This doesn't mean that you have to do all the work. As an example, I'll (obviously) use Gentoo. You install Gentoo and build your Gentoo-based distribution with exactly what you want in it. Since Gentoo is source-based to begin with, it should be easy to transition to your actual platform. Of course you won't want a C compiler and such on your actual platform, you do that on your development systems. This is really how most embedded Linux is done, with a development machine building the customized distribution for the actual release platform. I'll be honest and say that my experience with other embedded Linux is pretty much nil, but Gentoo will do what you want, and we have great community support. The nice thing about using Gentoo is it is basically the same thing as the normal distribution, and we support the platforms used for most embedded devices. Of course, you'll want to use what suits your needs best.
When I was first getting into Linux, I picked specific things that I wanted to learn to do, and focused on those. How do I setup a DNS server? RADIUS? DHCP? MySQL? I find it a bit easier if you have a goal set when trying to learn, rather than just trying to "learn more" about the system. During the course of working on these services, you'll learn more about the system. The secret is to not try to do the simplest installation/setup you can do, but the most interesting. Don't just setup RADIUS, setup RADIUS with a MySQL back-end. You'll quickly learn how different parts of different software operate and will get a better grasp of how things work. The basics really are the most fundamental thing to learn, since everything builds on them and most things in Linux are a combination of smaller, simpler tasks. For example, setting up a LAMP server is really, 4 tasks: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Of course, that's a bit oversimplified, but you get the idea.
The distribution doesn't matter. Your best method is to try as many as you can that are fundamentally different. Don't try Debian and Ubuntu and Knoppix. Try Ubuntu and Red Hat and Gentoo. Use systems that are as different from each other as you can, and you'll start quickly picking up on the differences and the similarities. This is what will make you a coveted administrator, since your skill set will be varied and you'll be well-versed in working in unfamiliar territory and good at resolving issues where you don't already know the answer. Also, definitely look into learning bash, and probably perl, too. You don't need to be an expert on them, but you'll definitely want to be familiar with them and be comfortable with them if you ever decide to become a Linux Administrator.
I hope this helps and welcome to the wonderful world of Linux.
What they did was pretty nefarious. Transgaming said that they would take down their CVS repository for the open source portions of WineX (way before the Cedega days) if we did not remove the ebuild from the tree. I would like to mention that Gentoo was not packaging a single file from Transgaming, and was using a publicly accessible CVS repository. Transgaming went to sar as to tell us that this hurt their business model. Rather than fight with a company that we (the Games team, at the time) thought was bad for the gaming industry, the ebuild was removed from the tree.
Well, Gentoo is always looking for good documentation people. Gentoo prides itself on having top-notch documentation. This is only possible by having good people. If you're really interested in helping out, you should contact the Gentoo Documentation Project and see about joining up. Even if you don't feel like joining the project, we always accept contributions from the community. There's also the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter if that is more your style.
Says who? Gentoo's goals are fairly well-aligned with making things simpler, so long as flexibility is not sacrificed for it.
It is my personal opinion that if you have to do anything on the command line, the software/OS has failed. Of course, that means that all operating systems out there fail in my eyes. Well, they do. Computers are complex, but the interface doesn't have to be complex. Gentoo will never likely become an OS that removes the ability for power users to use it as they wish, since that is one of the fundamental advantages of Gentoo, but it is very likely going to continue moving towards a more simple default installation. The goal is to eventually allow people to never need to drop to the command line to perform at least the most common tasks. Power users will always have the option to be CLI junkies. Of course, I'm referring to a user-oriented OS, not a server OS. Gentoo can be used for both, and only the user side is being geared towards making things more simplified and graphical. We would like to simplify the server side, as well, but only so far as to make management of Gentoo servers easier for the administrator without removing flexibility.
If you're interested in the server side of Gentoo, check out the SCIRE project.
Yes, but it also has Canadians.
*grin*
2: wade through the initial setup in the voluminous manual Uhh... Except that there's an Installer now, so everything else you've said here is complete and utter crap.
What I also find funny is that the only arguments that people can give against Gentoo is that the install takes a long time, which has not been the case since around 2003, when Gentoo started the GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) method of installation. Sure, you can do a stage1 installation and take days building your system if you have nothing better to do or are simply misinformed, but the recommended installation method is using the Installer, which takes somewhere around 20 minutes to have a complete GNOME workstation up and running for me.
I love these sorts of comments.
When Daniel was around, Gentoo also only had about 80 developers and less than 30,000 files in the tree. The package count was less than 1/4 what it is now. The bugs were still less than 25,000. There were horrible cliques within the distribution... tons of infighting. Daniel stopped doing Gentoo development long before he actually left the distribution. People seem to have this starry-eyed memory of when Daniel was around. Trust me, It wasn't a cake walk by any stretch of the imagination. While admittedly things have gotten worse of late, Daniel's presence had little to do with it. I think we would be in a similar situation had he not left. Remember that one of the reasons for his leaving was he got burnt out due to his inability to continue to manage the ever-growing distribution by himself. When he left the first time, it had already been a good year or so without much input from Daniel on anything regarding the direction of the distribution. Daniel's leaving the project didn't coincide with his reduced contributions, at all.
The biggest problem with the distribution is we are going through massive growing pains. Until recently, the leaders of the distribution were afraid to do much, for fear of upsetting developers. We've now started to realize that it's OK to upset a developer or two every now and then and that we need to work towards making the distribution better as a whole. We have been throwing around some ideas for some time and are working towards implementing them. These things take some time. Until then, we'll probably see a bit more of this sort of drivel being posted by all sorts of people. We need to get back to doing what we do best, making a kick ass distribution of Linux.
It isn't the optimizations. Anyone who tells you that likely doesn't know much about Gentoo or its motivations. What makes Gentoo nice is the flexibility and customization capabilities that are available out of the box. You don't compile on Gentoo so you get improved performance. That rarely happens, if ever. You compile on Gentoo so your packages are compiled the way that you want them, with the features you want, and none of the features you don't want.
There's still talks of using sqlite for this. Something that people tend to forget is that a file-system *is* just a database. It's just a certain kind of database. The whole "a database is faster" line if reasoning simply isn't true... certain database types and configurations are faster for certain workloads. Nobody has taken the time to find out what sort of configuration is really optimal for the repository. All we really have are some semi-working implementations and some half-baked theories and anecdotal evidence.
Some hard numbers and good testing methodologies is what we really need to replace the back-end.
You can have your tree on a squashfs, which works quite similarly, is supported by the kernel (gentoo-sources, anyway) and doesn't require additional dependencies for portage. I've also found tmpfs to work quite well, but many people won't have the RAM for it. Besides that, there are several implementations about for other back-ends for the repository for portage. It's just that none have been polished and adopted officially.
As for some space savings, we're switching to Manifest2, which removes *all* of the digest-* files from the tree, for 2007.0's release. This doesn't mean you'll need to install 2007.0, it just means we'll be enabling it by default along with the release. This saves a good portion of time and removes a huge number of small files from the tree.
I think the author's choice of the word "dumb terminal" is unfortunate, as these sorts of systems are anything but dumb. Most people think of these as a "thin client" instead these days. However, the author is spot on about how these can drastically reduce the cost of a system. One company that I have done work for decided to start using their old systems as thin clients. I built a custom software set for them. The hardware platform was old Dell Optiplex GX1 machines, with the hard drives removed. The machines boot solely off the network, load Linux, then connect to the appropriate resource. This has saved the company a ton of money, not only in the support costs required to maintain these machines, but also in the disposal of this aging hardware and the savings of not having to replace the machines with newer ones.
For a company just starting out, buying thin client hardware is a good investment. It shouldn't need updating of any kind, and most hardware is field-programmable anyway.
Huh? We assume no such thing. In fact, we really don't care what "most people" want, at all. We make no assumptions about support. It is Gentoo detractors who tend to claim that we do. We don't. What we care about is making Gentoo. If Gentoo doesn't fit your needs, don't friggin' use it! Trust me, you won't hurt our feelings. If you think Debian is better, use it. If you think Windows is better, use it. You aren't harming us in any way by using what you feel is the best tool for the job. In fact, that is exactly what we try to give to our users. We give them a set of tools to allow them to build what they want.
I think the biggest issue is that people seem to have this closed-minded view of software and Gentoo. They're stuck in this way of thinking that lends towards doing what the vendor tells you to do. They run Red Hat. They run Debian. They don't think that you can build what you want. Gentoo provides the tools to do just that. For many of my clients, I have built custom Gentoo-based distributions. What they get themselves is slightly different than Gentoo. They get pre-compiled packages. They get a very nice Internet-based update system for these packages. They don't jump into make.conf, at all. They don't need to make these kind of changes. Instead, I have built a custom distribution with the software that the customer wants on it. They install it from CD, and it has exactly what they want on it and nothing else. Gentoo is the tool that builds this system. I am using Gentoo as it was intended, to build exactly what I want. People tend to forget that it is impossible to make something that fits every need. Rather than try to do so, like other distributions do, we instead provide the tools to allow you to build it on your own. It's a completely different philosophy, which is why I understand that so many people simply don't get it.
What?
Have you ever used Gentoo? I will tell you that it is, in fact, the exact opposite. Packages will remain in our testing branch until the package maintainers or users request it become stable. At that point, it is tested by the various architecture teams and stabilized on each architecture individually based on the testing. Packages are never automatically promoted to stable.