That's all user space.

Honestly, I thought this was going to be a kernel rant, and I came loaded for bear: there's a lot that needs fixed about the Linux kernel and the processes and relationships between stakeholders.

But let's address the subject of the blog post instead, because there's a lot of fodder there too.

Everything complained about in the blog post is not a Linux problem, it's a Linux distribution problem, since the distributions are what add the user space components that are doing things like automatically mounting his phone so that something else in user space can't talk to the second control channel on the USB interface (because the phone uses the primary command channel to switch to the second command channel, and it's in use by the mount).

This is basically the problem you are going to face on a distribution without an overall architectural design for the user/kernel interaction, and interaction between user space components that allow for layered access.

For the "It's a camera! It's a phone! It's a mass storage device!" problem, I don't have a specific answer; I'll note that uugetty solved the contention for typed use of a resource problem for modems ("It's an inbound modem! It's an outbound modem!") in the 1980's in HoneyDanBer UUCP. And they did it by having an integrated model that all the consumers used. IT's called a layered approach to software development.

I think the big driver for user space problems is that a lot of Open Source people believe that *their* program is the most important thing your computer can possibly be running, and if it interferes with someone else's use of something, so what? The computer is still performing it's *most* important function, which is to run *their* work product.

Even Apple is not immune from these problems; there are third party phone tools that can do nifty things with pretty much any cell phone and come with all sorts of USB cable ends that plug into this USB cable adapter, but the OS grabs the phones out from under the software, and you have to hack the device ID list in a plist to get it to work like it's supposed to (then iPhoto, etc., can no longer see the phone). But at least on Apple systems, there's one place to go to to fix it, the fix is well known, and when Apple is informed of the problem, they generally fix their software to "get out of the way" (or tell the third party how to do it temporarily so their software will work).

What's really missing for Linux distributions, honestly is...

(1) An architect with a holistic vision
(2) A project manager for the components
(3) Productization - people in Open Source only want to work on fun stuff, not on boring stuff that makes stuff actually usable
(4) Usability engineering
(5) Interface contracts which don't change over time
(6) A way to shunt third party installed software (i.e. "apt get", etc. stuff) off into an isolated hierarchy so it doesn't screw with normal operation
(7) Documentation that doesn't have to change over time ...in other words, if you want it to look like a commercial OS distribution, you have to approach it as one. And that's not happening.

All of these "marketplaces" typically suffer from what I call "Chinese restaurant syndrome".

Every month or so, a new Chinese restaurant opens in this little office park my area. The undercut prices by as much as 20% the existing Chinese restaurant in the same office park, and attempt to lure in customers with a lower price. Which they do successfully. The restaurant that was already in that little office park goes under, not having any float to carry themselves over, since they spent all of it establishing themselves the same way.

Then you end up with one Chinese restaurant in the office park.

Then, having established customers, and eliminated their competition, they raise their prices. Which is OK, they are the only game in town, and their prices were absurdly (read: loss-leader) low in the first place. They surprisingly believe that in establishing a customer base, they have also bought those customers future loyalty - which they have not.

Then a new Chinese restaurant opens, and the cycle repeats: a long daisy-chain of new Chinese restaurants. I imagine them stretching, down through time, until Deckard from Blade Runner eats at one of them.

The point is, that the "consultants" on these sites are all new Chinese restaurants. There is always someone who will take a loss on a project in order to "establish themselves", and then try to raise their bid price, based on whatever passes for a "reputation scoring system" on the site in question.

Consumers of the site, however, look at everyone who bids on their job as fungible, and unless someone with a terrible "reputation score" is stupid enough to believe they will ever be hired by anyone, ever again, the lowest bidder always wins the bid.

A long chain of Chinese restaurants, stretching down through time...

And the only kind of jobs that are on that site are going to be jobs where the outcome is "nice to have, but not required", meaning they'll be happily surprised if the bidder produces something usable, but they really don't care if they totally screw up, since it's a slot machine pull anyway, and they only invested a nickel in the slots to begin with.

It's basically a sucker bet for the bidder, and a sucker bet for the person bidding, with the only winner being "The House" - the site hosting the arrangement.

Usually, the "person" actually farms the contracts out to a team of subcontractors in Sao Palo, and then takes credit for having done all the work themselves.

Votes on how long it will be until we see this:

A washing machine or other appliance that comes with USB stick with design files for replacement parts?

I have no idea... but I'm sure it's a subject we will all be watching closely.

The problem with step 1 being "Did I hit a person?" is that step 2 could be "No? Then let me try again!".

He listed three, but missed the obvious one.

His 3:

1. downloaded substitution valuation
2. avoided reproduction valuation
3. market savings valuation

While 2 & 3 could include this, his paper didn't claim they did. It's the primary value which I've seen applied to selection of Open Source Software valuation in many of the companies where I've worked:

4. time to market reduction

Even if you are leveraging a single part, the time savings vastly outweigh in many cases the R&D cost savings. Admittedly, this is only applicable to markets where there is a benefit to "first mover advantage" (typical software/internet startup problem), but it seems to apply equally well to hardware, if the open hardware in question is being utilized as a component of a larger system.

Wow, the stairs and the rough terrain!

These things are getting scary good, and I can't believe I felt bad about the thing getting kicked!

No, he said throw money at poverty and homelessness.

You are, of course, free to argue with The National Coalition for the Homeless:

"According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from some form of severe mental illness."
http://www.nationalhomeless.or...

"Although obtaining an accurate, recent count is difficult, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs."
http://www.nationalhomeless.or...

I'm not making a value judgement here, and yes, I realize that there is some overlap in those groups, due to the tendency for mentally ill persons to "self medicate" using those drugs available to them. The point is, these problems were nowhere near as prevalent before Governor Ronald Reagan instituted new rules on involuntary commitment in California (as a budget measure), and the NY ACLU won their supreme court case about non compis mentis people being able to refuse treatment for mental health issues. Without treatment, many become homeless.

Poverty is defined politically, and it's whatever's convenient for the politician defining it that day.

It also has a dictionary definition. From that dictionary definition, it's easy to come up with an economic definition.

Look, we've been in Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" for 51 years now. You can't win a war if you are unwilling to define victory conditions. We've proven that in the Vietnam conflict, and every war/conflict we've entered since then. When can we stop fighting "The War On Drugs"? When can we stop fighting "The War On Terror"?

What is the F'ing definition of victory conditions in "The War On Poverty"?

If we go by your definition, even a Basic Guaranteed Income can't possibly stop poverty. It's definitionally always going to be with us. We can either accept that it's always going to be with us, and declare at least an armistace, or we can keep throwing money at it with no hope of ever, ever winning, unless we are willing to implement a fully managed economy.

What idiot/liar keeps spreading this load of nonsense around? Hospitals are legally required to _stabilize_ you! That means that, if you show up dying of something acute, they have to take you in, but can kick you out the door the moment you're not in critical condition anymore. If you show up, for example, with a terminal case of cancer, they don't have to treat, or even diagnose your cancer. If you have immediate, life-threatening symptoms, they have to provide some treatment for those symptoms. In a practical sense, it pretty much just means that they have to provide a bed for you to die in when you're ready to drop. I'm not sure they're even legally required to provide painkillers for someone dying in excruciating pain. The laws you're talking about are basically just to stop people dropping dead in the ER, and they don't even manage to stop that from happening sometimes.

That's a reductio ad absurdum argument. By that argument, if I show up in end stage kidney failure, they *MUST* find a kidney for me, even if it's *impossible* because no kidneys are available, or because I'm an unsuitable recipient because I've pissed away my last 9 kidneys on heroin.

They are required to treat trauma, and they are required to treat life-threatening illnesses, and, under the ACA, they are required to treat you even if they can't pay because the government is going to pick up the bill with the 3.8% tax they've added to everyone's income.

So I guess the idiot you are looking for is "the current administration".

Again: at some point, having money means life.

Steve Jobs got his liver because he put a residence in the right place in Tennessee, which is known to have the highest rate of death of people with donor cards, and who have a viable liver at organ harvest time. It was basic math. And he increased the radius under which he would be considered a suitable recipient by having his own personal medivac helicopter on a landing pad right outside the living room of the house he bought in Tennessee for this specific purpose. And it was up to twice the radius of any other kidney recipient because there was only one way travel time, instead of two way travel time, should the hospital have to go fetch the recipient instead.

And at some point, the state is not going to pick up the tab for it.

And if "the current administration" isn't the idiot you're looking for... what did the ACA buy us, if the situation now is, as you say, the same as the situation before the ACA passed? It was supposed to insure *all* Americans.

At some point you *must* stop claiming that money not spent on launch vehicles or some other government program will magically be spent on resolving your pet hobby horse instead.

You obviously have not worked with chronically mentally ill people, nor gone out on an intervention outcall because someone was living in a dumpster because the metal was the only way to shield them, and their perfectly good room at the supported housing facility you had them in before they went off their meds is empty because they decided their room was bugged.

I've worked closely with mentally ill persons as a volunteer (my mother was a psychiatric social worker for a county mental health program, and her specific field was the chronically mentally ill), and still remain friends with some of them to this day, and get them intervention if I know they are in trouble.

Sadly, California county mental health programs are *fricking mean*. I ran into a man having a conversation with his voices, and he has either decompensated or was in the process of decompensating, at the Subway sandwich shop off DeAnza. He wasn't hurting anyone, but when I called Santa Clara County mental health to get someone out to help him, they refused, and said that if he was a problem, I should call the police.

Had I done that, the situation would have been very very bad. What he needed was an intake/intervention person on call to come out and talk him in, and then to see his caseworker, and get back on his meds. He *DIDN'T* need to be 5150'ed, and he surea as HELL didn't need to be dragged off to county lockup by jack-booted Nazis for a couple of days until some asshole too lazy to take a trip out with a deputy in the background for backup could then drag him off and shoot him full of Thorazine for 3 days.

So yes, I kinda *DO* know what I'm talking about. Asshole.

I was being facetious about rebar. Yes, they would be more like shaped tungsten telephone poles with control fins. The numbers I've seen claimed 0.12kt of TNT.

It'd be quite useful as a "terror weapon or bunker buster".

But assume you're right, and they only drop 1 ton conventional bombs from orbit. Private individuals aren't going to necessarily obey national treaties voluntarily for fear of retribution.

No, Just slower to answer.

Deceptively simple question time:

Q1: How much *additional information* did you end up learning through your research before you got to the information you wanted to get to?

Q2: How much *additional information* do you get when you Google something or look it up on Wikipedia?

Q3: Compare and contrast the magnitudes of both values from Q1 & Q2

Q4: Is it *really* better today, where you lose the exposure to that additional information, some of which you inevitably integrate into your knowledge base and internalize, and may happen to find useful later?

I disagree.

We did rote memorization of multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division. We also did rote memorization of spelling. We also learned process for math and for spelling: none of the "new math" or "whole language" reading crap which sabotages you later on.

If I see a word written in the Roman alphabet, I don't care if it's Latin, Greek, Romanized Japanese, or a really obscure English word: I can pronounce it with 99.? % accuracy; if I hear one, I will likely spell it correctly; if I see it written while reading, and have heard it but never seen it written before: no problem. If I see two numbers, I can add them instantly without thinking about it, if they are two digits or less, and very quickly, if they are more digits than that.

These are things which are handicapped by present teaching methods: they are the excluded cases, *particularly* the ability to recognize written words one has heard but never seen written before. It's like having a tiny square which you can extend horizontally or vertically, but not into the vast unmapped space; sadly, slashdot won't let me ASCII-art it for you, but...

Imagine a graph where quadrant 2 is a small square, quadrant 4 is a big square, and quadrants 1 and 3 are long a thin horizonatally and vertically, respectively.

You get taught quadrant 2, you can generalize to quadrants 1 & 3, and if something is in quadreant 4: you're screwed.

It's definitely a failure of the school system that these skills are not taught to students because we have changed our teaching methods. The sad part is that you tend to get better standardized test results early on with these methods, and then they rapidly fall off as complexity goes up afterwards, i.e. the first time you try to do trig, or the first time you have to read a book and do a book report, etc..

The new methods don't work, except to teach shortcuts; the "whole language" you get for free, over time; the math shortcuts, you can learn later *after* you can operate from memory.

Absolute ceiling on a Boeing 747 is ~51,000 feet. That's about the service ceiling for most military jets, and their absolute ceiling is much hgher than that. The SR-71 Blackbird had a service ceiling of ~92,000 feet; its absolute ceiling remains classified.

That's 5,000 feet under the service ceiling of the F-14; A Mig-25 on a ballistic arc (after its air-breathing engines were no longer functioning, it was ballistic until it reentered the atmosphere) is recorded to have hit 123,000 feet in 1977. The ballistic arc on an F-18 should be substantially better than that, but I suspect if you want actual numbers, they are classified.

The point is that the first part of getting up there is the hardest, and military and military-grade airgraft are substantially better at getting up higher because they can reach a higher altitude, and can be going multiple Mach at the time they go ballistic (think "muzzle velocity").

So no, a commercial jet is a bad idea.