~$ mv CommitAccess MergePrivileges
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Linus talks about his distributed model, how everyone has a branch, and how this avoids politics associated with who gets commit access. He claims (and I admit I've seen this happen in some) that many projects have quite the internal politicking on who has CVS commit access. But then he claims that Git's special sauce eliminates these internal politics. Ok, I was intrigued, so I listened on.
Essentially, he explains, the secret with Git is that everyone has commit access on their own branch - they do whatever they want. He says that the way it works is that someone does something cool with their own branch, then they start hollering to say "Hey, I have a good branch, merge mine" and it will get merged. Politics over.
Ok, so now I'm scratching my head. How is this a fundamentally different paradigm? In CVS, basically anyone can check out the whole tree and make any changes the like. They can then say, see, my changes are good and ask for them to get committed or ask for commit access themself. In Git, this commit access bottleneck is just moved from the commit stage to the merge stage. You make your changes, commit them to your separate and unique branch, and then ask someone with to merge it, or give you the ability to merge it in to mainstream. How exactly does this eliminate the politics? You are still going to have some people with "the power" and some people without. In any project where you have people who are going to fight about who gets commit access, you'll just have a fight about who has the ability to merge into mainstream.
So, ok, distributed is nice (though for some projects central may be preferred) but I don't see how this magic system bypasses politics. In fact, I can potentially see more internal politics over this method. I can see factions gathering to support this or that branch, arguing about which is better, fighting about which one gets merged in. I can see the potential for branches going longer between merges, and more changes happening at once, making it harder to track problems. I don't claim these scenarios are more likely, but I do claim that this changing from a commit access to a merge access paradigm is just renaming the problem.
I'd rather see a sci-fi use a firearm, like Firefly did and Battlestar Galactica does, than have them insult my intelligence with the twisty, curvy, spiky, doo-dad-ly junk we've been fed the last fifty years. I mean, for artistic reasons, every show is going to want to have the iconic BFG every now and then. For humour value if nothing less. You see this in Firefly sometimes. But weapons exist for one reason, to make it easier to project force. I don't look back at "ray gun" designs with fondness. I see a bunch of catering to the lowest-common-denominator intelligence, let's make things look as funky different as possible just to make them look funky different. It was a tool used by bad writers and bad producers who didn't have content that was distinctive enough, so had to be distinctive with bling.
Even if this is about tight integration of the RDBMS into a redistributable product, the statement about PostgreSQL doesn't make sense. Do what you want with it is always do what you want with it. The author is throwing arguments from different viewpoints out as if they ought to be arguments from one viewpoint. Sure, there are those in the open source community that say BSD is too free that all should be GPL, but that's hardly going to be an argument from a user perspective, no matter what the user wants to do with it.
I've read the different theories on what some people say "could" happen. Strangelets and micro-black-holes (where Hawking's theory of evaporation is wrong) tend to be the worst case scenarios. My question, though, is are the coming generation of colliders capable of producing energies greater than is already seen in the rare high-engergy cosmic rays? If not, then the types of particles or events created in our accelerators is unlikely to be any different than happens all over the universe when these cosmic rays hit things and whomever submitted this article was talking out his yin-yang when he implied it would be creating particles not seen since the big bang.
My understanding is that cosmic rays can reach 10^20eV. Wikipedia has an article on what was believed to be a single proton with an energy of 50 joules. If that article is correct, I'm doubtful that CERN can can pump that kind of energy into a proton, which means that these sort of collisions are happening all the time.
catch a glimpse of the subatomic particles that are thought to have last been seen at the Big Bang I read of "fringe" scientists who warn that there could be potential catastrophic consequences to the coming generation of colliders. The answer to these warnings seems to be that cosmic rays of higher energy than our colliders can generate have been zipping around for billions of years - so if something "bad" could come of it, then it would have already happened.
So, is the above quote simply a poster who doesn't know what he is talking about (someone more interested in a catchy phrase in an article than in actually disseminating facts), or are these colliders actually capable of generating particles that haven't existed since the big bang? I tend to think the former - but I'm not a physicist, just a geek.
All I can say about this is... wow. What a piece of editing that was. Just the shear workforce-hours involved documenting the needed phrases within Disney works. The dripping irony of using Disney clips is too precious for words.
I'm not one to waste space with a "me too" post that is essentially just the noise of me clapping, but this video deserves a standing ovation.
The reaction was discovered by Jerry Woodall, center, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. Ya, sure it was.
Charles Allen, holding test tube, and Jeffrey Ziebarth, both doctoral students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are working with Woodall to perfect the process. They had nothing to do with discovering it... nope... because, they're just students, and students can't never discover nothin'.
The above is why I could never do post-graduate work. I'd love to do research - but the idea of having my discoveries and/or inventions stolen by some ossified... err.. tenured relic because that's just the way the system works just makes me angry.
Let's get this straight - they want me to send $1500 to Russia to pay for a keyboard that isn't even scheduled to come out for seven months? You've got to be kidding me.
How long before they realize (if they haven't already) they have an idea worth more than their little company ten times over, that they don't need to produce anything, and that the rest of the world hasn't a hope in hell of ever seeing their money again if they just run with it? They could prolly drag it out for another six or seven months. Oh, our technology had a setback - we've fixed it but things are delayed. Oh, our (unnamed) Taiwanese manufacturer had difficulty tooling up for our complicated design... we'll have the keyboard out in two more months... but the good news is the production run will be larger so we can take more preorders.
Maybe that's all completely unfair... in fact I'd even stipulate that it's probably unfair. But I'm not sending this kind of cash to a country trying to restart the cold war.
Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well! Actually, being an ATI fan, I hope NVidia doesn't release open source drivers. ATI will get a lot of goodwill with this, at the very least, and at most, if Dell's experience with Linux is good, perhaps they'll get more sales. Go ATI.:)
I don't think their driver source has anything in it that discloses AGP specifications. They've been using Linux apgart code for a while, in a manner that may have already been violating the license.
Yes, it's an inflammatory subject, but it's exactly what needs to happen. "Software as a service" is the wet dream of many corporations right now, because it offers a per use pricing model and offloads an enormous amount of control to the vendor. When their machines run everything, it's DRM heaven.
Certain software works well as a service. Anything that is inherently multi-user, such as social chat, collaboration, bulletin boards (including the so-called Web 2.0, which is really not much more innovative than the dial-up bulletin boards of the '80s) - all those things work well as a network service. The querying of large databases can work well too, depending on what the data is. Google, encyclopedias, etc. Certain software doesn't. OpenOffice will always work best on the desktop.
"Software as a service" is a catch phrase the editors here seem to like to push in articles as it riles up those of us who know better and attracts comments. Comments attract more comments, and this pumps up Slashdot. The thing is, this type of behaviour is self-defeating, as while it does churn the butter, but some spills out. Every time you poke a stick into a hornets nest, sure, the hive will get all riled, but some will just get fed up fly somewhere else, and it does nothing to attract new blood.
So, for everyone's sake, please stop posting crap like this.
Nobody knows for sure there is dark matter. All dark matter is is the empty space in current theories. It's a placeholder for observations that can't be explained any better. We don't know why galaxies behave like they do, so we'll just invent a substance that takes the place of something that might make them do what we think we're seeing them do. We don't know if dark matter exists, so let's make it into stars? I'm in agreement here, this sounds like someone needed something to publish or perish.
SETI has more credibility than this - at least we know for a fact that one planet has life.
The worms were in canisters, the canisters were in a spacecraft designed to (even if it didn't actually) withstand the stresses of reentry. The spacecraft had already endured most of the heat of reentry and was torn apart by atmospheric stresses, not thermal. The canisters would have rapidly decelerated to their terminal velocity after the orbiter's breakup. In short, the survival of those worms is not so much a demonstration that organism can survive reeentry, than it is a demonstration of stupidity on the part of the scientists who used the fact they survived the accident to posit that organism can survive reentry.
I'm not suggesting than no organism can surive reentry, just that this isn't a valid precedent.
When you are a country who's law allows the kidnapping of foreign nationals, who's laws allow "rendition", who's laws allow Guantanamo to exist... a country who spies on everyone else, then you see yourself in others too. One tends to expect from others the sort of treatment you meet out. Conversely, the society for which the above is unthinkable tends not to see those threats everywhere else.
This story isn't so much funny, as it is deeply... deeply sad.
All the threats are tempest in a teapot. The AACS-LA claims that the key is a component of a copy protection circumvention mechanism. The problem with that theory, is that by the time the key was published widely, it was already revoked. As the key was no longer valid, it really can't be said to be part of a circumvention system. Which just makes all the threatening letters all that much more brainless. Dvorak didn't know just how right he was.
Silverman and his group (Rymer, Tallman, Rawlinson, and Bea) have their collective heads up their arses. They suggest that they can't see any sort of enterprise in the complaint. In the complaint, it is alleged that one partner would get the credit card info and send it to the other to process and bill. If two corprorations working together to this end - and even memorializing the arrangement contractually- doesn't comprise an "enterprise", good heavens what does? With these guys making decisions, it's no wonder the ninth circuit has so many of their decisions reversed. I'm just glad that enough other justices were on the panel with heads on their shoulders to make the correct decision. If this had been remanded solely because the complainants should have been able to amend to "correct" his mistake, it would have been substantially harder for them to prove their case. I mean, how much more evidence of an enterprise can you actually get? If these were solely criminal organizations, they wouldn't even have had contracts to memorialize their arrangements (at least not contracts like the legal system thinks of the term). What was Silverman thinking?
All issues are binary. There is just more than one issue involved here. Both sides can be wrong here only because there is more than one issue at stake, and both are on the wrong side of at least one of them.
Thus, one should perhaps think less about supporting one of the sides in this story and more about picking from it one or more issues that you feel strongly about.
So, basically what you seem to be admitting to is exactly what I pointed out in my original post - that CACert was given a moving target to hit. They request inclusion at a time when there are no standards and get told no because there are no standards. Excuse me? But if they can just wait... we'll make a standard. Meanwhile, other certificate authorities are being added, but ok, they wait. For a year. They wait for standards to get set and then meet those standards, but that's not good enough and the standards change. So the merry-go-round goes around again. I stopped following it in detail a couple years ago, because I found I would just get angry at the 'wtf' factor of it all.
Which brings me to another post of yours, suggesting that "[t]he problem is not Mozilla, but as in your suggestion Cacert, which in four years time failed to comply to the policy of Mozilla". Now that's a little disingenuous don't you think? More of that 'wtf' factor - sort of a capital 'WTF' really.
Someone didn't do their homework. Sorry, but you failed to read the assignment so you get an 'F' in popular history.
This is, because they didn't comply to the Mozilla policy. There was no policy when CACert began asking. Read the bugzilla report and you will see how they only decided they wanted a policy after CACert came knocking. I don't know about you, but when an organization accepts certificates from all comers and then when I come around they say "sorry, but we only accept certificates by those who meet a policy we haven't drafted yet", then I start to feel snubbed.
There was no such promise
Ok, since you don't like to visit links when they are handed to you on a platter, not even when the relevant message is directly linked, I'll quote the whole thing here:
My sincere apologies. I suspect that I may have been the bottleneck here -- I'm
the person tasked with developing the mozilla.org policy on inclusion of root CA
certs, and with approving noot root CAs for inclusion. Unfortunately between
work, my wife's back surgery, and caring for a 17-month old child I have fallen
badly behind on both getting the policy completed and approving any new CAs.
In any case, I have looked over the documentation provided for CAcert, and I
approve of including their root CA cert in Mozilla. I'm not the person who does
the actual work, but I'll send that person an email to tell them to go ahead and
include the cert as soon as possible.
Again, I'm very sorry for the severe delays in getting this issue resolved. [italics added] This was posted February 2nd, 2004. More than two years ago. That looks to me to be exactly what I described - a promise by someone at least claiming authority to do so to add CACert's root certificate to Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Linus talks about his distributed model, how everyone has a branch, and how this avoids politics associated with who gets commit access. He claims (and I admit I've seen this happen in some) that many projects have quite the internal politicking on who has CVS commit access. But then he claims that Git's special sauce eliminates these internal politics. Ok, I was intrigued, so I listened on.
Essentially, he explains, the secret with Git is that everyone has commit access on their own branch - they do whatever they want. He says that the way it works is that someone does something cool with their own branch, then they start hollering to say "Hey, I have a good branch, merge mine" and it will get merged. Politics over.
Ok, so now I'm scratching my head. How is this a fundamentally different paradigm? In CVS, basically anyone can check out the whole tree and make any changes the like. They can then say, see, my changes are good and ask for them to get committed or ask for commit access themself. In Git, this commit access bottleneck is just moved from the commit stage to the merge stage. You make your changes, commit them to your separate and unique branch, and then ask someone with to merge it, or give you the ability to merge it in to mainstream. How exactly does this eliminate the politics? You are still going to have some people with "the power" and some people without. In any project where you have people who are going to fight about who gets commit access, you'll just have a fight about who has the ability to merge into mainstream.
So, ok, distributed is nice (though for some projects central may be preferred) but I don't see how this magic system bypasses politics. In fact, I can potentially see more internal politics over this method. I can see factions gathering to support this or that branch, arguing about which is better, fighting about which one gets merged in. I can see the potential for branches going longer between merges, and more changes happening at once, making it harder to track problems. I don't claim these scenarios are more likely, but I do claim that this changing from a commit access to a merge access paradigm is just renaming the problem.
I'd rather see a sci-fi use a firearm, like Firefly did and Battlestar Galactica does, than have them insult my intelligence with the twisty, curvy, spiky, doo-dad-ly junk we've been fed the last fifty years. I mean, for artistic reasons, every show is going to want to have the iconic BFG every now and then. For humour value if nothing less. You see this in Firefly sometimes. But weapons exist for one reason, to make it easier to project force. I don't look back at "ray gun" designs with fondness. I see a bunch of catering to the lowest-common-denominator intelligence, let's make things look as funky different as possible just to make them look funky different. It was a tool used by bad writers and bad producers who didn't have content that was distinctive enough, so had to be distinctive with bling.
Even if this is about tight integration of the RDBMS into a redistributable product, the statement about PostgreSQL doesn't make sense. Do what you want with it is always do what you want with it. The author is throwing arguments from different viewpoints out as if they ought to be arguments from one viewpoint. Sure, there are those in the open source community that say BSD is too free that all should be GPL, but that's hardly going to be an argument from a user perspective, no matter what the user wants to do with it.
I've read the different theories on what some people say "could" happen. Strangelets and micro-black-holes (where Hawking's theory of evaporation is wrong) tend to be the worst case scenarios. My question, though, is are the coming generation of colliders capable of producing energies greater than is already seen in the rare high-engergy cosmic rays? If not, then the types of particles or events created in our accelerators is unlikely to be any different than happens all over the universe when these cosmic rays hit things and whomever submitted this article was talking out his yin-yang when he implied it would be creating particles not seen since the big bang.
My understanding is that cosmic rays can reach 10^20eV. Wikipedia has an article on what was believed to be a single proton with an energy of 50 joules. If that article is correct, I'm doubtful that CERN can can pump that kind of energy into a proton, which means that these sort of collisions are happening all the time.
Lepton dancers wearing gluons.... WHOA!
Revenue from advertising, as always.
Get yer hot fresh strange quark...
So, is the above quote simply a poster who doesn't know what he is talking about (someone more interested in a catchy phrase in an article than in actually disseminating facts), or are these colliders actually capable of generating particles that haven't existed since the big bang? I tend to think the former - but I'm not a physicist, just a geek.
All I can say about this is... wow. What a piece of editing that was. Just the shear workforce-hours involved documenting the needed phrases within Disney works. The dripping irony of using Disney clips is too precious for words.
I'm not one to waste space with a "me too" post that is essentially just the noise of me clapping, but this video deserves a standing ovation.
...something that was pretty much laurel-and-hardy-slap-in-the-face implied by the video.
Actually, if you want to get picky... if it were a copyright violation (which it isn't), then it would be a civil breach, not a criminal one.
And your post, which some might think* should be criminal, is really just indicative of a low watt bulb.
* This author does not disclose what he believes on this subject on the grounds that he would absolutely incriminate himself.
The above is why I could never do post-graduate work. I'd love to do research - but the idea of having my discoveries and/or inventions stolen by some ossified... err.. tenured relic because that's just the way the system works just makes me angry.
Let's get this straight - they want me to send $1500 to Russia to pay for a keyboard that isn't even scheduled to come out for seven months? You've got to be kidding me.
How long before they realize (if they haven't already) they have an idea worth more than their little company ten times over, that they don't need to produce anything, and that the rest of the world hasn't a hope in hell of ever seeing their money again if they just run with it? They could prolly drag it out for another six or seven months. Oh, our technology had a setback - we've fixed it but things are delayed. Oh, our (unnamed) Taiwanese manufacturer had difficulty tooling up for our complicated design... we'll have the keyboard out in two more months... but the good news is the production run will be larger so we can take more preorders.
Maybe that's all completely unfair... in fact I'd even stipulate that it's probably unfair. But I'm not sending this kind of cash to a country trying to restart the cold war.
I posted about this yesterday. Not a lot has changed.
I don't think their driver source has anything in it that discloses AGP specifications. They've been using Linux apgart code for a while, in a manner that may have already been violating the license.
Yes, it's an inflammatory subject, but it's exactly what needs to happen. "Software as a service" is the wet dream of many corporations right now, because it offers a per use pricing model and offloads an enormous amount of control to the vendor. When their machines run everything, it's DRM heaven.
Certain software works well as a service. Anything that is inherently multi-user, such as social chat, collaboration, bulletin boards (including the so-called Web 2.0, which is really not much more innovative than the dial-up bulletin boards of the '80s) - all those things work well as a network service. The querying of large databases can work well too, depending on what the data is. Google, encyclopedias, etc. Certain software doesn't. OpenOffice will always work best on the desktop.
"Software as a service" is a catch phrase the editors here seem to like to push in articles as it riles up those of us who know better and attracts comments. Comments attract more comments, and this pumps up Slashdot. The thing is, this type of behaviour is self-defeating, as while it does churn the butter, but some spills out. Every time you poke a stick into a hornets nest, sure, the hive will get all riled, but some will just get fed up fly somewhere else, and it does nothing to attract new blood.
So, for everyone's sake, please stop posting crap like this.
Nobody knows for sure there is dark matter. All dark matter is is the empty space in current theories. It's a placeholder for observations that can't be explained any better. We don't know why galaxies behave like they do, so we'll just invent a substance that takes the place of something that might make them do what we think we're seeing them do. We don't know if dark matter exists, so let's make it into stars? I'm in agreement here, this sounds like someone needed something to publish or perish.
SETI has more credibility than this - at least we know for a fact that one planet has life.
The worms were in canisters, the canisters were in a spacecraft designed to (even if it didn't actually) withstand the stresses of reentry. The spacecraft had already endured most of the heat of reentry and was torn apart by atmospheric stresses, not thermal. The canisters would have rapidly decelerated to their terminal velocity after the orbiter's breakup. In short, the survival of those worms is not so much a demonstration that organism can survive reeentry, than it is a demonstration of stupidity on the part of the scientists who used the fact they survived the accident to posit that organism can survive reentry.
I'm not suggesting than no organism can surive reentry, just that this isn't a valid precedent.
A large gas giant isn't necessarily uninhabitable. It has long been posited that life could evolve in the upper layers.
When you are a country who's law allows the kidnapping of foreign nationals, who's laws allow "rendition", who's laws allow Guantanamo to exist... a country who spies on everyone else, then you see yourself in others too. One tends to expect from others the sort of treatment you meet out. Conversely, the society for which the above is unthinkable tends not to see those threats everywhere else. This story isn't so much funny, as it is deeply... deeply sad.
All the threats are tempest in a teapot. The AACS-LA claims that the key is a component of a copy protection circumvention mechanism. The problem with that theory, is that by the time the key was published widely, it was already revoked. As the key was no longer valid, it really can't be said to be part of a circumvention system. Which just makes all the threatening letters all that much more brainless. Dvorak didn't know just how right he was.
Silverman and his group (Rymer, Tallman, Rawlinson, and Bea) have their collective heads up their arses. They suggest that they can't see any sort of enterprise in the complaint. In the complaint, it is alleged that one partner would get the credit card info and send it to the other to process and bill. If two corprorations working together to this end - and even memorializing the arrangement contractually- doesn't comprise an "enterprise", good heavens what does? With these guys making decisions, it's no wonder the ninth circuit has so many of their decisions reversed. I'm just glad that enough other justices were on the panel with heads on their shoulders to make the correct decision. If this had been remanded solely because the complainants should have been able to amend to "correct" his mistake, it would have been substantially harder for them to prove their case. I mean, how much more evidence of an enterprise can you actually get? If these were solely criminal organizations, they wouldn't even have had contracts to memorialize their arrangements (at least not contracts like the legal system thinks of the term). What was Silverman thinking?
Poor Bybee was sour grapes too.
All issues are binary. There is just more than one issue involved here. Both sides can be wrong here only because there is more than one issue at stake, and both are on the wrong side of at least one of them.
Thus, one should perhaps think less about supporting one of the sides in this story and more about picking from it one or more issues that you feel strongly about.
So, basically what you seem to be admitting to is exactly what I pointed out in my original post - that CACert was given a moving target to hit. They request inclusion at a time when there are no standards and get told no because there are no standards. Excuse me? But if they can just wait... we'll make a standard. Meanwhile, other certificate authorities are being added, but ok, they wait. For a year. They wait for standards to get set and then meet those standards, but that's not good enough and the standards change. So the merry-go-round goes around again. I stopped following it in detail a couple years ago, because I found I would just get angry at the 'wtf' factor of it all.
Which brings me to another post of yours, suggesting that "[t]he problem is not Mozilla, but as in your suggestion Cacert, which in four years time failed to comply to the policy of Mozilla". Now that's a little disingenuous don't you think? More of that 'wtf' factor - sort of a capital 'WTF' really.
Ok, since you don't like to visit links when they are handed to you on a platter, not even when the relevant message is directly linked, I'll quote the whole thing here: My sincere apologies. I suspect that I may have been the bottleneck here -- I'm the person tasked with developing the mozilla.org policy on inclusion of root CA certs, and with approving noot root CAs for inclusion. Unfortunately between work, my wife's back surgery, and caring for a 17-month old child I have fallen badly behind on both getting the policy completed and approving any new CAs.
In any case, I have looked over the documentation provided for CAcert, and I approve of including their root CA cert in Mozilla. I'm not the person who does the actual work, but I'll send that person an email to tell them to go ahead and include the cert as soon as possible.
Again, I'm very sorry for the severe delays in getting this issue resolved.
[italics added] This was posted February 2nd, 2004. More than two years ago. That looks to me to be exactly what I described - a promise by someone at least claiming authority to do so to add CACert's root certificate to Mozilla.