Posts by jedd

What's wrong with this picture

Quoting :

" ... it contains a subset of the source code for the Solaris Operating System, but with an open source license."

and

"... [DTrace and ZFS] are likely to make it to Linux due to licensing and personality conflicts."

Interpreting this, I conclude that "It contains a a set of software - some is open source, some is not (and you're on your own trying to work out which is which, and how they can call the whole thing 'OpenSolaris' when the whole thing clearly isn't open)".

As another reader pointed out, this is reminiscent of Sun's wranglings over x86 versions a decade or so ago, or even their flip-flopping about WABI (anyone else old enough to remember this debacle?). This whole 'too little, too late' trend is a bit sad as I used to be a big advocate of Sun kit.

YA comment

WRT the guest speaker - it's interesting to hear someone in Mike's position, but maybe in future your email invitations could add 'turn off Skype & gchat blips' to the list that presumably already includes 'turn your mobile off and lock the kids in the bathroom'.

WRT the claims about users of free software not contributing. And you think this is something that's only happened in the past 12 months? I read a spiel, probably around a decade ago, about the benefits of people who were 'merely' users of free software. Advocacy, for starters, but even just being passively observed to be using an alternative to the incumbent is good press for that alternative.

I tend to agree with this observation - it's hard to prove, yes absolutely, and there definitely are a number of grumpy people who don't appear to contribute materially, but for as long as they're the minority they can be happily ignored.

Quoting one of the guys (all you yanks sound the same to me, sorry ;)

"There's that mix of .. where people have that struggle with open-source versus free software ... I think what you were getting .. was people misinterpreting these comments about open-source always having to be free."

Maybe rms is right - the usage of the phrase 'open-source' really does confuse the [primary] issue. I couldn't understand the above comment at all, and if anything I'm even more convinced that the speaker doesn't understand what free software means (or is meant to mean, if you prefer).

Free software development .v. games. I've yet to work out how you could write a multiplayer game using free software *and* prevent ne'er-do-wells from subverting the environment. In the absence of a punkbuster-esque utility (which by definition needs to be non-free software) it doesn't seem possible to protect the game's community. An interesting algorithmic conundrum for someone, perhaps.

Entirely agree with AC above - the cost of entry to the games market now must be astonishing. When I were a lad .. I had a part time job helping the guy next door (a TRS-80 games programmer) make copies of his games on cassettes. His cost of entry was his TRS-80, an assembly language reference, and a high-speed tape-dubbing machine. Oh my - I need a lie down now.

But as usual, of course, I did enjoy the show .. mostly. :)

E .. stop taking them

Dude, wireshark didn't 'nick' ethereal code. They had to rename the project due to a copyright conflict against the old name. Bit like netsaint->nagios, and doubtless many other examples. About 15 seconds (wp: wireshark) would have resolved this confusion .. but it's fascinating that you, a seemingly regular user of the software, haven't noticed the transition in the two years since it happened.

Can you guess what bugs me?

A. Almost everything

Q. Sucks what?

I'm a Debian bigot, verily, but SuSe really does blow the big one - I've discovered this after having been forced to use it in a Novell shop here (5 servers deployed so far, 60 to go).

It's horrible in all the ways that Redhat and Solaris and AIX were wantonly horrible - it's designed badly, with minimal care, and targetted at people who expect OS maintenance to be complex and difficult. I guess it makes good marketing sense - people with low expectations are easily separated from their money.

Installing applications typically requires a separate activity to actually start them, and then a lengthy read through of non-SuSe-specific README files in the (if they remembered to provide it) /usr/share/doc/packages directory ... where you attempt to translate the compilation instructions into a 'this is how you should configure it on SuSe' sequence. Monumental waste of everyone's time and money.

Efficient carbon

Efficiency is a complicated subject - not least because different people mean different things by the word. Claiming internal combustion engines have an average of 35% efficiency is odd, given a four-stroke engine can't theoretically be more than 25% efficient (one out of four strokes produce energy, the other three use it). Unless you're trying to include 2-stroke engines in there .. but the numbers aren't there, especially for transport, and their efficiency suffers elsewhere anyway.

But I'm more concerned about this zinger:

"In France, to be sure, you can use grid power which comes mostly from nuclear generators and thus is nearly carbon-free"

From whoa to go (commissioning through mining through transport through decommissioning) your average fission nuclear power plant is about 75% of fossil fuel consumption, and consequently 'carbon emitting', as a coal-fired power plant. The myth that 'nuclear is nearly carbon-free' isn't one we should be perpetuating.

Anyhoo, what I really like about this (and similar) approaches is that it makes it possible for us little people to set up our own energy supply line - using home-scale wind or solar systems we can manage ourselves, incidentally removing us from the 'consumer' approach to energy.