I can't help but point out that the ridiculous amount of cache on processors these days can obviate concerns over the load-store-load thing, and processors (rather memory controller chipsets) will always optimize that sort of thing. Granted: fetching from cache is not as fast as direct operation on a register, but how many loops are tight enough to execute in less cycles than a fetch from (L1 or L2) cache? Now we're getting into "costing" operations where it pays to do architecture comparisons because of the drastic differences in pipeline depths, etc.
People are stupid about "market share." What they mean is a percentage of the horizontal (everyone) market. The problem is that you don't need everyone to buy your competitive product with a small tiny profit margin. All you need is a decent number of people who believe the price you're asking with a significant margin is worth it.
When people talk about "market share" it's like they are counting heads in two opposing armies. First, users aren't in the armies; developers are. Second; it isn't the headcount but the operational capabilities of those developers. It's like saying "My thousand infantrymen can kick your five bomber pilots' asses and then blow up their airplanes." Maybe, in special circumstances they could...
You see, the reason Apple is still here is that there is an impasse. A segment, or rather a niche, firmly props Apple up. The windahs crowd will slavishly swallow anything you spray in their faces, and then cheer about it later: "my software company has a bigger ____!"
The reason Apple will not die is that they make products which compel people to buy them. I still want a 17" PowerBook for x-mas! Indeed.
Re:doing our homework before we post...
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Smart Billboards
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· Score: 1
What I hope is not lost:
Making the same mistake when you point out someone else's mistake.
It's kinda funny if you take a step back and give yourself a chance to smile and appreciate the irony:)
I'm not sure that this is necessarily an optimization like I'm referring to. I'm not exactly sure what gcc does for instance, but I would expect sizeof(int) to be calculated and stored for easy reference when the program block or function provifing scope is pushed onto the stack. I would consider recomputing sizeof(int) every iteration to be foolish. Is it even legal to change the type of a variable? What's the point of declaring a variable type before you use it if you need to do sizeof(type) every time you ++ it?
Maybe the meaning of optimizing compiler is changing and becoming more sophisticated. I was thinking more on the lines of unrolling loops and flattening scopes to avoid stack operations where it isn't strictly necessary.
Do I make any sense at all?
I really am not daunted by the pointer arithmetic. Maybe I was branded at an early age. I'm not sure this is a good readability example for me anyways. One is more abstract is all.
doing our homework before we post...
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Smart Billboards
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· Score: 1
Right. Someone else already pointed that out. My mistake. And you may have also missed where I said I was having a "big-brother" moment.. Thanks for teaching us about doing our homework before we post...
Re:My iPod + iRock = devalued radio (wasted ads)
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Smart Billboards
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· Score: 1
I guess I didn't read this carefully enough. I had a kind of big-brother moment there. Thanks for keeping my feet on the ground:)
What happens if 200 people are in line looking at the billboard doing 65 and everyone is listening to something different? I don't read billboards while listening to good music. I still see radio content changing to accomodate the smart billboards...
Theoretically, an optimizer would transform object code into something that always produces the same set of output for any given set of input, but it would do it faster than the un-optimized code. Since the direct correlation of objects in the object code and descriptions in the source code is broken, debuggers will often fail to work correctly on optimized code. Even if it worked perfectly all the time, there is no guarantee that optimized code will always be faster than unoptimized code. If the source code is architected with strict mathematical Ockham's Razor style, then the object code will be unoptimizable any further: reduced to its minimal terms.
The question I want to ask: why would you intentionally write source code whose object code can be significantly improved by optimizations? Platform neutrality (is that just modular compilation or optimization's role)? Source code readability (what about putting some effort into your comments and READMEs)? Laziness (what if your hour of programming effort will yield beyond what you would expect from optimization, many hours of saved work by running the program)?
Let's skip the polemic and get right to the meat of the question. WTF is the point of optimization? Can we do better?
My iPod + iRock = devalued radio (wasted ads)
on
Smart Billboards
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I primarily listen to my iPod using an iRock FM transmitter. Its signal strength is low enough that I fear Billboards may overpower it.
If I *ever* catch a commercial interrupting the sanctum of my iPod to my car stereo, I will clip the antenna lead and install a loop around the sticky pad where my iPod sits. If that doesn't work, I'll cut radio completely out. I'll get a preamp and amp with a direct connection.
Who needs radio? I won't go back to radio until there is some kind of cellular packet radio with multicast distribution. Then I could listen to my favorite stations cross country. Even with a 5GB iPod, smart playlists allow you to randomly rotate 2.5 days of continuous uninterrupted no-repeat music from your own collection. Even a 64MB flash based MP3 player will give you 45 minutes to an hour. 256MB is easily one leg of a car trip or a two-way commute.
In my family, smart billboards would be called "a day late and a dollar short." All it's really worth is a line in the sand drawn by the Ad companies. Flip them the bird!
What other possible reason is there for wanting open source and a free software license but for the right to fork? If you edit one single file and recompile, that binary and the file you edited are a fork in the development. This is what programmers do when they share. They fork off of each others' work, and then *gasp* they merge their respective forks!
There can be no merge without a respective fork. Forking is essential. It is the meaning of life. Fork fork fork. Merge merge merge. Fork; merge: because you can. When people ask "What is Open Source?" you should say "Promiscuous forking and merging of everyone's ideas and code."
Now, the danger to a business in Open Source: they might think it is a free lunch. TANSTAAFL. Everything you have also has you, and if you think you don't have to pay there will be surprise costs. It's either blood and sweat or enough money to get someone else to throw in sufficient blood and sweat. When you adopt free software, you either fork and freeze, or you commit to keeping up with development. This is the same as commercial software patch management. The prior developers are writing code for purposes outside the scope of your business mission. You can't "squeeze" the vendor in free software, but you can hire programmers to make your own fork. There you either commit to merging your changes back into the project, or you commit to maintaining your own fork. As long as you understand those costs and you compare them to migration from one piece of software to another, you just have more choices than closed proprietary software.
More choices is a problem for the business world. The suits are struggling to maintain business competence in an increasingly technological. More choices requiring more technical engineering perspective mean more challenges to the established order of wink-and-handshake discretion in business decisions. More power is unwelcome responsibility without the skills to master the empowered situations and their choices. Part of the problem is the suits' idea that mistakes are unacceptable. The real issue is why the suits are so afraid that they are choosing between "the devil you know and the devil you don't know."
In short: I agree. My spiritual insight on this matter is that suffering comes immediately from the clash of bad expectations (or what Nietzsche called "bad faith") and the bitter actuality of life. On one hand someone has the expectation (probably from the suggestion of the Debian support docs) that their questions will be warmly recieved by the folks in #debian at freenode. On the other hand, there are jerks in #debian who want nothing more sophisticated than to gloat about the authority with which they turned someone with a "lamer" question away.
Of course the jerks should not be so mean. Unfortunately we have no good reason to expect them to be nice. Lots of people are struggling like fish at the end of a line to cope with their problems. Some thrashing implied. Jerks will be mean. Be lenient in what you require; be strict in what you provide. Do not expect everyone in #debian to sympathise with your plight.
That said, does the asker have anything to offer for the query? I mean why should anyone care about the update servers being down? The jerks and non-jerks alike have a legitimate complaint about people barking up the wrong tree. Lots of lazy people try to get IRC to do their homework for them. They are like trolls. They are annoying. Give a man a fish? Teach a man to fish?
Now I can bring up the general issue with Free Software: it is designed to enable you to help yourself. If you lack the mental acuity or discipline to help yourself, then you are trying to use the efforts of others in lieu of your own effort. What's bad about that is that those people (called lamers on IRC) want other people to take responsibility for their systems. It's inauthentic, ingenuine, weak, slavish. If you're not up to RTFM, then you are not really a peer. If you are not a peer, and you derive benefit from people's efforts, then you are merely a user. There is a master-slave relationship which the lofty peers of free software have justly depreciated. It is irresponsible.
People always ask me for Unix help with their pet project or whatever (because I'm the admin in these parts). I always tell them just what to do (but only the next step), with warning that they will have to figure some things out on their own. I tell them to come back to me with a specific question when they are stuck. Sometimes they do it. Mostly they are all hot air.
So, how to effectively and efficiently support your free software peers is not an easy question, and if there isn't lack of consensus, there is lack of common practice. People look to commercial companies for the support, but that is often a "trust your mechanic" conflict-of-interest type relationship. Living well is difficult, and it requres discipline and observation skills to do. Good software is the same. I blame "consumer culture" because people don't understand that *they* are the producers as well as the consumers.
What to tell people: if the software does not meet your expectations, it is YOUR responsibility to make up the difference, and if you want people to care about your problem, maybe you should show some concern to them about theirs first! You should believe that the effort you put into designing/improving/developing software is less than the benefit you will reap by solving your problems or "scratching your itch." You should not expect some wizard whom you don't even know to grant all of your your wishes. If you understand why other people would/should care about your problem then you know how to bark up the right tree. I believe the dissatisfaction with #debian at freenode was really a problem of selfishness in individuals.
In general, people are just like that. Specifically, when free software programmers find some common ground, they make it count for more than they can realize themselves, which is good. There is a LOT of great stuff out there for free (as in free speech). It isn't all things to all people though. The real question is whether someone will sell you what you want at a price you're willing to pay. You have no right to expect it, but if you are willing to give a little in compromise, you might make a difference.
Accusing someone with a legitimate point of being a troll is a _VERY_ bad thing to do.
Agreed. Giving the complaint about juvenile behavior in freenode #debian the benefit of the doubt, lets assume people in the channel were neither helpful nor friendly. The Debian Support page's references to IRC are misleading. What should Debian do to be consistent with the indications on the above supoprt page?
Some people will claim that IRC is inherenly socially flawed because of the abuse of MODEs: "Give it up. IRC is not useful." Other people could claim that Debian should protect and moderate the channel on trusted servers on a trusted IRC network.
Does this reflect on the programmer community in Open Source or Free Software? Are we still in the same discussion, or has our tangent become a new topic?
I'm not so sure Debian's failure to deliver support on freenode #debian is a reflection on the community in general. I am not concerned about this thread being a troll thread any more, but let's be rigorous about the inferences we draw from the facts as we know/assume them.
Sometimes you just get what you pay for. This sort of problem is likely to happen in a proprietary closed-source system when you underpay for services that have no clear service levels guaranteed. I think this is a non sequitur in the problems/culture of free software community at large.
What if you switched "debian" to "Windows XP" and were talking about a stale Windows Update server? Are you going to go to freenode and get on IRC #WinXP and ask a bunch of wannabes to give you free technical support or reason why they are not as competent as they seem or opportunity to reinforce their position in the #WinXP channel pecking order?
It isn't plain how the example cited in the parent of this thread is related to the general problems of the free software development community. Are the jokers in #debian at freenode actually the developers at the root of this discussion? Uh... NO!
So, pardon me if I am concerned this thread might be a troll.
Seriously, who pays this company for what and why should they even care? They bought Walnut Creek CDROM when the consumer Internet connections got fast enough for people to stop buying CDROMs full of free software. Why? Walnut Creek hosted a big FTP server and had some CDROM mastering coing on. Did Wind River need distribution for their products to get them out to a wider audience? Why is there both BSDMall.com and FreeBSDMall.com?
In this day and age you should know to understand a business by the needs it fills and whose cash is represented in sales. Wind River is a mystery. Proceed with caution.
That sounds like a slap in the face! What has Israel got against Microsoft? Have they supported past enemies of Ariel Sharon?
Someone tell Steve Jobs to make a computing device targeted at asians and middle-eastern average joes. Head the Wintel beast off at the pass. Pick up the market share on both sides of the 3rd world war.
What if ARMAGEDDON was the virtual battlefield for control of the home computer market? Mighty Microsoft and Intel and HP vs. Adroit Apple and Big Blue IBM? Where do the media companies fall? Sun with AMD cleaning up the low-cost server market?
It's the ECONOMY stupid!
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Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Informative
While most people thought it was magic unleashed on the world, I saw the Internet as a developed captive military technology released into the commercial sector. It was like a grant from the DoD. Is there more where that came from?
If you can sit back and receive defense technology and all you have to do is product development, then of course it makes no sense to burn cash on long-term R&D. Many economists and political scientists think that R&D is more efficient and effective in the public sector anyway. R&D in the private sector yields patents, which end up limiting the economic impact of the technology developed.
I can swallow Carr's ideas if he means companies should pool their resources into a creative commons for serious R&D, and then everyone can share the intellectual harvest. I can't swallow his recommendations if he means that advancing IT is too risky or otherwise unprofitable for anyone to bother with.
Ironically, IT has no value when you don't know how it reduces waste and generates economic benefits. If you do what Carr recommends, sooner or later you will think yourself right through the "IT is pointless" argument because you will understand the needs and know your idea coming from practical business operational knowledge, is a good IT risk.
I'm not saying I agree with Carr, but I wholeheartedly agree with him promoting this kind of debate! Also, are the people in commercial sector IT qualified to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one? I still believe we have a serious shortage of smart people. I think we should slow down IT to the rate at which smart people can deliver good IT.
IANAL, so could someone please give me a hint as to how this NINE YEAR OLD legal settlement can even be raised if there is a SEVEN YEAR statute of limitations.
Can they argue that AT&T didn't know what they agreed to, and subsequently allowed to happen, up until SCO bought the rights from them? "We, meaning SCO, didn't buy what AT&T thought they sold to us. We bought something much more. Actually we claim stuff that AT&T thought they gave away before selling the rights to us?"
If intellectual property can be handled in the law like real estate, then why not also apply eminent domain as in "SCO hasn't for a LONG time been the de-facto owner of anything anyone else cares about. Even if the old paper would have entitled them to something, they gave it up when all these years they allowed us to act as if we owned it and spent all of our blood and sweat to keep it useful. Now that what they have is unsalable, they are only trying to claim the fruits of our labor." What do you think about that?
So Windows 95 was more secure than WFW and NT was more secure than DOS7 based Win9x, and they're getting better with the 2003 stuff. Blah blah blah.
The reason it is not secure is because it is governed by a function of the corporate bottom line and the lowest-common-denominator home PC buyers. These are people who aren't really qualified to buy a refrigerator, but some of them just throw money at the problem and others are resigned to "getting by."
The bottom line still true: people who care don't do windows. I gotta admit, until I was in the position of supporting it, it seemed great. Once I became aware of other people's problems I realised how necessary it is to start a user out in a little hole and give them the pieces they need to build a ladder.
What we need is a distro of Linux based on pr0n. pr0niX will be a *very* eye-candy distro, with a few useful apps designed to make the computer look useful, but under the hood is a broadband-wasting porn harvesting machine that works unsupervised, tirelessly, 24/7 to acquire all the porn it can amass, harnessed by your "query of kink." pr0niX runs in two modes: free and subscription based pr0n (pay sites included). If you pay for the support contract, you get premium pr0n. Otherwise, you get the scrapings of stuff harvested off Usenet. The only sysadmin functions are tuning the harvesters and cleaning out the old pr0ns.
Somebody hurry up and tell me that Winders is jest fine fer luekinit nekkid pichers! I forgot porn addicts don't really need Linux....
I've seen this all before... Oh yeah: that's what Slackware was about. You see, real hackers installed Linux the hard way, and SLACKERS used Slackware. You can slack off your installation... Red Hat was (as far as I can remember) based on Slackware, which left much to be desired back in the day.
Now we come full circle. May I interest you in trying FreeBSD 4.x? Have I mentioned the PORTS tree?
How about a direct republic where people get initiative, but it has to pass with a lot more than a simple majority and the initiative and the vote are separated by a minimum discussion period?
I think it's worthwhile to discriminate between the kind of sanctioned investing that protected vehicles like common stock are good for and Venture Capital (VeeCee, singular) from "Angels" and Venture Capitalists (VeeCees, plural).
I believe you should be able to sue the investors in a corporation if the corporation causes damages beyond the value of the corporation when the courts order judgements to be paid. For example, if an investor puts up some VC toward a caper with a big upside, then the caper flops, then the victims are left holding the bag: punish them with a sliding-scale fraction of their revenues like a crippling form of income tax. Use the money to hire cops to pick through their garbage looking for something to bust them on.
let's just assume money and energy are the same. If a guy on the street says "I got this machine, and all I need is a socket to plug it into. It'll run up your power bill, but if it gets up to umpteen thousand RPMs it will start kicking out SOLID GOLD!" I get excited, maybe because I believe the guy or maybe because I saw him wink and I want in on the second-level of the pyramid scheme. I invite him to plug in on my meter, and BAM! It explodes, showering the countryside with toxic heavy metal waste like a volcano of chemical waste. I should expect to be put in stocks and caned for my irresponsibility, and I should expect to have my accounts emptied to pay for the cleanup. I should expect a long prison sentence if the fugazi cost someone their life.
It is illegal and damaging to use the civil court system to intimidate people if you have no good reason to believe the law is behind you (like if you LIED about the facts used to support your complaint). A countersuit is in order, but who to sue?
Me too, but I'm going to do my own asset management. I'll put big random numbers in my RFIDs and my homemade R2D2 will pick up and sort my laundry for me. It will also find my remote, and put it back where I like it.
I can give them to friends and let them give out to people as party invitations. When they come to the door, they need their RFID to get in, and I can go mingle instead of wathing the door. At the door, speakers will play my preproduced introduction, mixed into the music like DJ Hurricane back in the 80s.
NO MORE ANONYMOUS COPS!
We could pass a law requiring public servants to wear their ID whenever they are earning their pay. That way misdeeds and good service can get their just-desserts faster.
Then there will be the cool "detaggers" designed to fry the RFIDs. Like the metal-detector wands they use at airports, but clear, with a little jacobs' ladder going between the electrodes, or like the "pads" on the bottom of the hovercraft in The Matrix. Night Clubs and the underworld will show off their extravagance with the use of faraday cages and ultrawideband EMI lightshows. Old school high-voltage gear with warm tubes will be the bling bling. There will be the industrial technological revolution, which probably has already begun, and there will be the homegrown technology revolution.
The cat toothpaste is out of the bag tube!
Oh, and props go out to you-know-who because he said it first: "The revolution will not be televised."
So, are you going to repeat this analysis with numbers for the UltraSparcIV and Gemini chips when they hit the streets?
Stick around a while and discover that the processor industry has a lot of competitive leapfrogging. This is good because they are doing a lot of different innovation between them. This improves the art of processor architecture and design.
Maybe it is in Darwin, and maybe it is in Mac OS X Server, but it is not in OS X unless it is buried. Assuming I have a copy of Jaguar running on my Mac, where should I look for tip(1)?
The real end-game here is cars that fly-by-wire and can semi-intelligently (at least better than most drivers) avoid doing obviously stupid things. Think putting your car into reverse instead of drive or vice/versa and driving into the garage wall or another car when you meant to pull out of your parking spot. Also think about assistive technology like a newtork of cars relaying warnings to each other like a rear-end collision sends a warning up the chain of cars on the expressway faster than human perception activating a warning buzzer and dashboard light.
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I can't help but point out that the ridiculous amount of cache on processors these days can obviate concerns over the load-store-load thing, and processors (rather memory controller chipsets) will always optimize that sort of thing. Granted: fetching from cache is not as fast as direct operation on a register, but how many loops are tight enough to execute in less cycles than a fetch from (L1 or L2) cache? Now we're getting into "costing" operations where it pays to do architecture comparisons because of the drastic differences in pipeline depths, etc.
People are stupid about "market share." What they mean is a percentage of the horizontal (everyone) market. The problem is that you don't need everyone to buy your competitive product with a small tiny profit margin. All you need is a decent number of people who believe the price you're asking with a significant margin is worth it.
When people talk about "market share" it's like they are counting heads in two opposing armies. First, users aren't in the armies; developers are. Second; it isn't the headcount but the operational capabilities of those developers. It's like saying "My thousand infantrymen can kick your five bomber pilots' asses and then blow up their airplanes." Maybe, in special circumstances they could...
You see, the reason Apple is still here is that there is an impasse. A segment, or rather a niche, firmly props Apple up. The windahs crowd will slavishly swallow anything you spray in their faces, and then cheer about it later: "my software company has a bigger ____!"
The reason Apple will not die is that they make products which compel people to buy them. I still want a 17" PowerBook for x-mas! Indeed.
What I hope is not lost:
Making the same mistake when you point out someone else's mistake.
It's kinda funny if you take a step back and give yourself a chance to smile and appreciate the irony :)
I'm not sure that this is necessarily an optimization like I'm referring to. I'm not exactly sure what gcc does for instance, but I would expect sizeof(int) to be calculated and stored for easy reference when the program block or function provifing scope is pushed onto the stack. I would consider recomputing sizeof(int) every iteration to be foolish. Is it even legal to change the type of a variable? What's the point of declaring a variable type before you use it if you need to do sizeof(type) every time you ++ it?
Maybe the meaning of optimizing compiler is changing and becoming more sophisticated. I was thinking more on the lines of unrolling loops and flattening scopes to avoid stack operations where it isn't strictly necessary.
Do I make any sense at all?
I really am not daunted by the pointer arithmetic. Maybe I was branded at an early age. I'm not sure this is a good readability example for me anyways. One is more abstract is all.
Right. Someone else already pointed that out. My mistake. And you may have also missed where I said I was having a "big-brother" moment.. Thanks for teaching us about doing our homework before we post...
I guess I didn't read this carefully enough. I had a kind of big-brother moment there. Thanks for keeping my feet on the ground :)
What happens if 200 people are in line looking at the billboard doing 65 and everyone is listening to something different? I don't read billboards while listening to good music. I still see radio content changing to accomodate the smart billboards...
Theoretically, an optimizer would transform object code into something that always produces the same set of output for any given set of input, but it would do it faster than the un-optimized code. Since the direct correlation of objects in the object code and descriptions in the source code is broken, debuggers will often fail to work correctly on optimized code. Even if it worked perfectly all the time, there is no guarantee that optimized code will always be faster than unoptimized code. If the source code is architected with strict mathematical Ockham's Razor style, then the object code will be unoptimizable any further: reduced to its minimal terms.
The question I want to ask: why would you intentionally write source code whose object code can be significantly improved by optimizations? Platform neutrality (is that just modular compilation or optimization's role)? Source code readability (what about putting some effort into your comments and READMEs)? Laziness (what if your hour of programming effort will yield beyond what you would expect from optimization, many hours of saved work by running the program)?
Let's skip the polemic and get right to the meat of the question. WTF is the point of optimization? Can we do better?
I primarily listen to my iPod using an iRock FM transmitter. Its signal strength is low enough that I fear Billboards may overpower it.
If I *ever* catch a commercial interrupting the sanctum of my iPod to my car stereo, I will clip the antenna lead and install a loop around the sticky pad where my iPod sits. If that doesn't work, I'll cut radio completely out. I'll get a preamp and amp with a direct connection.
Who needs radio? I won't go back to radio until there is some kind of cellular packet radio with multicast distribution. Then I could listen to my favorite stations cross country. Even with a 5GB iPod, smart playlists allow you to randomly rotate 2.5 days of continuous uninterrupted no-repeat music from your own collection. Even a 64MB flash based MP3 player will give you 45 minutes to an hour. 256MB is easily one leg of a car trip or a two-way commute.
In my family, smart billboards would be called "a day late and a dollar short." All it's really worth is a line in the sand drawn by the Ad companies. Flip them the bird!
What other possible reason is there for wanting open source and a free software license but for the right to fork? If you edit one single file and recompile, that binary and the file you edited are a fork in the development. This is what programmers do when they share. They fork off of each others' work, and then *gasp* they merge their respective forks!
There can be no merge without a respective fork. Forking is essential. It is the meaning of life. Fork fork fork. Merge merge merge. Fork; merge: because you can. When people ask "What is Open Source?" you should say "Promiscuous forking and merging of everyone's ideas and code."
Now, the danger to a business in Open Source: they might think it is a free lunch. TANSTAAFL. Everything you have also has you, and if you think you don't have to pay there will be surprise costs. It's either blood and sweat or enough money to get someone else to throw in sufficient blood and sweat. When you adopt free software, you either fork and freeze, or you commit to keeping up with development. This is the same as commercial software patch management. The prior developers are writing code for purposes outside the scope of your business mission. You can't "squeeze" the vendor in free software, but you can hire programmers to make your own fork. There you either commit to merging your changes back into the project, or you commit to maintaining your own fork. As long as you understand those costs and you compare them to migration from one piece of software to another, you just have more choices than closed proprietary software.
More choices is a problem for the business world. The suits are struggling to maintain business competence in an increasingly technological. More choices requiring more technical engineering perspective mean more challenges to the established order of wink-and-handshake discretion in business decisions. More power is unwelcome responsibility without the skills to master the empowered situations and their choices. Part of the problem is the suits' idea that mistakes are unacceptable. The real issue is why the suits are so afraid that they are choosing between "the devil you know and the devil you don't know."
In short: I agree. My spiritual insight on this matter is that suffering comes immediately from the clash of bad expectations (or what Nietzsche called "bad faith") and the bitter actuality of life. On one hand someone has the expectation (probably from the suggestion of the Debian support docs) that their questions will be warmly recieved by the folks in #debian at freenode. On the other hand, there are jerks in #debian who want nothing more sophisticated than to gloat about the authority with which they turned someone with a "lamer" question away.
Of course the jerks should not be so mean. Unfortunately we have no good reason to expect them to be nice. Lots of people are struggling like fish at the end of a line to cope with their problems. Some thrashing implied. Jerks will be mean. Be lenient in what you require; be strict in what you provide. Do not expect everyone in #debian to sympathise with your plight.
That said, does the asker have anything to offer for the query? I mean why should anyone care about the update servers being down? The jerks and non-jerks alike have a legitimate complaint about people barking up the wrong tree. Lots of lazy people try to get IRC to do their homework for them. They are like trolls. They are annoying. Give a man a fish? Teach a man to fish?
Now I can bring up the general issue with Free Software: it is designed to enable you to help yourself. If you lack the mental acuity or discipline to help yourself, then you are trying to use the efforts of others in lieu of your own effort. What's bad about that is that those people (called lamers on IRC) want other people to take responsibility for their systems. It's inauthentic, ingenuine, weak, slavish. If you're not up to RTFM, then you are not really a peer. If you are not a peer, and you derive benefit from people's efforts, then you are merely a user. There is a master-slave relationship which the lofty peers of free software have justly depreciated. It is irresponsible.
People always ask me for Unix help with their pet project or whatever (because I'm the admin in these parts). I always tell them just what to do (but only the next step), with warning that they will have to figure some things out on their own. I tell them to come back to me with a specific question when they are stuck. Sometimes they do it. Mostly they are all hot air.
So, how to effectively and efficiently support your free software peers is not an easy question, and if there isn't lack of consensus, there is lack of common practice. People look to commercial companies for the support, but that is often a "trust your mechanic" conflict-of-interest type relationship. Living well is difficult, and it requres discipline and observation skills to do. Good software is the same. I blame "consumer culture" because people don't understand that *they* are the producers as well as the consumers.
What to tell people: if the software does not meet your expectations, it is YOUR responsibility to make up the difference, and if you want people to care about your problem, maybe you should show some concern to them about theirs first! You should believe that the effort you put into designing/improving/developing software is less than the benefit you will reap by solving your problems or "scratching your itch." You should not expect some wizard whom you don't even know to grant all of your your wishes. If you understand why other people would/should care about your problem then you know how to bark up the right tree. I believe the dissatisfaction with #debian at freenode was really a problem of selfishness in individuals.
In general, people are just like that. Specifically, when free software programmers find some common ground, they make it count for more than they can realize themselves, which is good. There is a LOT of great stuff out there for free (as in free speech). It isn't all things to all people though. The real question is whether someone will sell you what you want at a price you're willing to pay. You have no right to expect it, but if you are willing to give a little in compromise, you might make a difference.
Some people will claim that IRC is inherenly socially flawed because of the abuse of MODEs: "Give it up. IRC is not useful." Other people could claim that Debian should protect and moderate the channel on trusted servers on a trusted IRC network.
Does this reflect on the programmer community in Open Source or Free Software? Are we still in the same discussion, or has our tangent become a new topic?
I'm not so sure Debian's failure to deliver support on freenode #debian is a reflection on the community in general. I am not concerned about this thread being a troll thread any more, but let's be rigorous about the inferences we draw from the facts as we know/assume them.
Sometimes you just get what you pay for. This sort of problem is likely to happen in a proprietary closed-source system when you underpay for services that have no clear service levels guaranteed. I think this is a non sequitur in the problems/culture of free software community at large.
What if you switched "debian" to "Windows XP" and were talking about a stale Windows Update server? Are you going to go to freenode and get on IRC #WinXP and ask a bunch of wannabes to give you free technical support or reason why they are not as competent as they seem or opportunity to reinforce their position in the #WinXP channel pecking order?
It isn't plain how the example cited in the parent of this thread is related to the general problems of the free software development community. Are the jokers in #debian at freenode actually the developers at the root of this discussion? Uh... NO!
So, pardon me if I am concerned this thread might be a troll.
Conspiracy theorists go nuts!
Seriously, who pays this company for what and why should they even care? They bought Walnut Creek CDROM when the consumer Internet connections got fast enough for people to stop buying CDROMs full of free software. Why? Walnut Creek hosted a big FTP server and had some CDROM mastering coing on. Did Wind River need distribution for their products to get them out to a wider audience? Why is there both BSDMall.com and FreeBSDMall.com?
In this day and age you should know to understand a business by the needs it fills and whose cash is represented in sales. Wind River is a mystery. Proceed with caution.
That sounds like a slap in the face! What has Israel got against Microsoft? Have they supported past enemies of Ariel Sharon?
Someone tell Steve Jobs to make a computing device targeted at asians and middle-eastern average joes. Head the Wintel beast off at the pass. Pick up the market share on both sides of the 3rd world war.
What if ARMAGEDDON was the virtual battlefield for control of the home computer market? Mighty Microsoft and Intel and HP vs. Adroit Apple and Big Blue IBM? Where do the media companies fall? Sun with AMD cleaning up the low-cost server market?
While most people thought it was magic unleashed on the world, I saw the Internet as a developed captive military technology released into the commercial sector. It was like a grant from the DoD. Is there more where that came from?
If you can sit back and receive defense technology and all you have to do is product development, then of course it makes no sense to burn cash on long-term R&D. Many economists and political scientists think that R&D is more efficient and effective in the public sector anyway. R&D in the private sector yields patents, which end up limiting the economic impact of the technology developed.
I can swallow Carr's ideas if he means companies should pool their resources into a creative commons for serious R&D, and then everyone can share the intellectual harvest. I can't swallow his recommendations if he means that advancing IT is too risky or otherwise unprofitable for anyone to bother with.
Ironically, IT has no value when you don't know how it reduces waste and generates economic benefits. If you do what Carr recommends, sooner or later you will think yourself right through the "IT is pointless" argument because you will understand the needs and know your idea coming from practical business operational knowledge, is a good IT risk.
I'm not saying I agree with Carr, but I wholeheartedly agree with him promoting this kind of debate! Also, are the people in commercial sector IT qualified to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one? I still believe we have a serious shortage of smart people. I think we should slow down IT to the rate at which smart people can deliver good IT.
IANAL, so could someone please give me a hint as to how this NINE YEAR OLD legal settlement can even be raised if there is a SEVEN YEAR statute of limitations.
Can they argue that AT&T didn't know what they agreed to, and subsequently allowed to happen, up until SCO bought the rights from them? "We, meaning SCO, didn't buy what AT&T thought they sold to us. We bought something much more. Actually we claim stuff that AT&T thought they gave away before selling the rights to us?"
If intellectual property can be handled in the law like real estate, then why not also apply eminent domain as in "SCO hasn't for a LONG time been the de-facto owner of anything anyone else cares about. Even if the old paper would have entitled them to something, they gave it up when all these years they allowed us to act as if we owned it and spent all of our blood and sweat to keep it useful. Now that what they have is unsalable, they are only trying to claim the fruits of our labor." What do you think about that?
So Windows 95 was more secure than WFW and NT was more secure than DOS7 based Win9x, and they're getting better with the 2003 stuff. Blah blah blah.
The reason it is not secure is because it is governed by a function of the corporate bottom line and the lowest-common-denominator home PC buyers. These are people who aren't really qualified to buy a refrigerator, but some of them just throw money at the problem and others are resigned to "getting by."
The bottom line still true: people who care don't do windows. I gotta admit, until I was in the position of supporting it, it seemed great. Once I became aware of other people's problems I realised how necessary it is to start a user out in a little hole and give them the pieces they need to build a ladder.
What we need is a distro of Linux based on pr0n. pr0niX will be a *very* eye-candy distro, with a few useful apps designed to make the computer look useful, but under the hood is a broadband-wasting porn harvesting machine that works unsupervised, tirelessly, 24/7 to acquire all the porn it can amass, harnessed by your "query of kink." pr0niX runs in two modes: free and subscription based pr0n (pay sites included). If you pay for the support contract, you get premium pr0n. Otherwise, you get the scrapings of stuff harvested off Usenet. The only sysadmin functions are tuning the harvesters and cleaning out the old pr0ns.
Somebody hurry up and tell me that Winders is jest fine fer luekinit nekkid pichers! I forgot porn addicts don't really need Linux....
I've seen this all before... Oh yeah: that's what Slackware was about. You see, real hackers installed Linux the hard way, and SLACKERS used Slackware. You can slack off your installation... Red Hat was (as far as I can remember) based on Slackware, which left much to be desired back in the day.
Now we come full circle. May I interest you in trying FreeBSD 4.x? Have I mentioned the PORTS tree?
How about a direct republic where people get initiative, but it has to pass with a lot more than a simple majority and the initiative and the vote are separated by a minimum discussion period?
I think it's worthwhile to discriminate between the kind of sanctioned investing that protected vehicles like common stock are good for and Venture Capital (VeeCee, singular) from "Angels" and Venture Capitalists (VeeCees, plural).
I believe you should be able to sue the investors in a corporation if the corporation causes damages beyond the value of the corporation when the courts order judgements to be paid. For example, if an investor puts up some VC toward a caper with a big upside, then the caper flops, then the victims are left holding the bag: punish them with a sliding-scale fraction of their revenues like a crippling form of income tax. Use the money to hire cops to pick through their garbage looking for something to bust them on.
let's just assume money and energy are the same. If a guy on the street says "I got this machine, and all I need is a socket to plug it into. It'll run up your power bill, but if it gets up to umpteen thousand RPMs it will start kicking out SOLID GOLD!" I get excited, maybe because I believe the guy or maybe because I saw him wink and I want in on the second-level of the pyramid scheme. I invite him to plug in on my meter, and BAM! It explodes, showering the countryside with toxic heavy metal waste like a volcano of chemical waste. I should expect to be put in stocks and caned for my irresponsibility, and I should expect to have my accounts emptied to pay for the cleanup. I should expect a long prison sentence if the fugazi cost someone their life.
Build high, Build high!!!
It is illegal and damaging to use the civil court system to intimidate people if you have no good reason to believe the law is behind you (like if you LIED about the facts used to support your complaint). A countersuit is in order, but who to sue?
Me too, but I'm going to do my own asset management. I'll put big random numbers in my RFIDs and my homemade R2D2 will pick up and sort my laundry for me. It will also find my remote, and put it back where I like it.
I can give them to friends and let them give out to people as party invitations. When they come to the door, they need their RFID to get in, and I can go mingle instead of wathing the door. At the door, speakers will play my preproduced introduction, mixed into the music like DJ Hurricane back in the 80s.
NO MORE ANONYMOUS COPS!
We could pass a law requiring public servants to wear their ID whenever they are earning their pay. That way misdeeds and good service can get their just-desserts faster.
Then there will be the cool "detaggers" designed to fry the RFIDs. Like the metal-detector wands they use at airports, but clear, with a little jacobs' ladder going between the electrodes, or like the "pads" on the bottom of the hovercraft in The Matrix. Night Clubs and the underworld will show off their extravagance with the use of faraday cages and ultrawideband EMI lightshows. Old school high-voltage gear with warm tubes will be the bling bling. There will be the industrial technological revolution, which probably has already begun, and there will be the homegrown technology revolution.
The cat toothpaste is out of the bag tube!
Oh, and props go out to you-know-who because he said it first: "The revolution will not be televised."
So, are you going to repeat this analysis with numbers for the UltraSparcIV and Gemini chips when they hit the streets?
Stick around a while and discover that the processor industry has a lot of competitive leapfrogging. This is good because they are doing a lot of different innovation between them. This improves the art of processor architecture and design.
Maybe it is in Darwin, and maybe it is in Mac OS X Server, but it is not in OS X unless it is buried. Assuming I have a copy of Jaguar running on my Mac, where should I look for tip(1)?
The real end-game here is cars that fly-by-wire and can semi-intelligently (at least better than most drivers) avoid doing obviously stupid things. Think putting your car into reverse instead of drive or vice/versa and driving into the garage wall or another car when you meant to pull out of your parking spot. Also think about assistive technology like a newtork of cars relaying warnings to each other like a rear-end collision sends a warning up the chain of cars on the expressway faster than human perception activating a warning buzzer and dashboard light.