There is an unspoken assumption by "sensitive" people that they deserve your time, or that their ideas need to be heard irrespective of merit.

Disagreeing with them, correcting them, or challenging them is _offensive_ to them.

Your first response doesn't convey the additional problem the way the 2nd one does

What additional problem?

"Hi, I am the busiest man in the free software world, and you just consumed my valuable time with amateur level mistakes. We have a FAQ about this, which you either didn't read or didn't understand, and as a result, my productivity has suffered. Please re-read the contribution FAQ. If you are still confused, send a message to LKML, not to me"

"I've cc'd this response to LMKL so that others don't repeat your mistakes, and so that everyone else is expecting your follow up questions and amended patch"

It's not "abusive" to point out that when people don't do their due diligence, everyone else suffers. Set an expectation of excellence, and expect people to follow it.

Results first. Feelings later.

Do you have any evidence of this? At all?

Because here's what I see:

Linux has remade the software world in its own image. I'd hardly call that "failing". Real actual super computer companies (e.g. Silicon Graphics) stopped developing their own OS and started shipping Linux.

Microsoft, the arch nemesis of Linux and Open Source, is shipping kernel patches and releasing code under open source licenses.

What does "success" look like to you?

And lest you say "that's just a singular case", we can look at Theo and OpenBSD. OpenBSD has been wildly successful, both as a BSD fork, but also in its broader mission to cultivate a software culture of excellence and correctness, with results that speak for themselves.

Linux and OpenBSD are two of the oldest open source projects around, with two pretty intense personalities at the helm.

I see no evidence to support your claim whatsoever.

There's this idea in the US that you are never allowed to hurt anyone's feelings.

The problem with that is that people are irrational, oversensitive, and cannot control themselves. Interacting with such fragile daisies is like tiptoeing through a minefield.

It is not, to me, a foregone conclusion that assertive people should tolerate having to deal with sensitive people. That is the prevailing dogma in US business, but it's not clear why that should be the case.

The meta response to this entire conversation space should be "stop bothering me with your bullshit and submit some fucking code"

For many years, I ran an alix2d3 box with OpenBSD installed on it as my edge device. Excellent hardware, excellent OS.

pf.conf is simple for a basic configuration.

If you want to run off of a read-only flash file system, or have a router-style config experience, there are adaptations for that purpose also. But just plain old boring openBSD is a great place to start.

My favorite thing about openBSD is how lightweight the install is. There is very little garbage you'll want to shut off or remove.

For the canonical SOHO edge device, choose any x86 hardware you have, put 2 network interfaces on it, and you're done.

A basic pf.conf that gives you NAT and blocks everything evil from the outside is only a few lines, and well documented on the interwebs.

Put your samba server somewhere else.

Oddly enough, I finally retired my openbsd device and got a few Ubiquity EdgeRouters. My home network situation changed and I wanted a smallish device with POE support, but still wanted a real OS on it..

And what if you don't get the green card? Then you will go back home, and be the ideal candidate for offshoring the job you care currently doing -- although at much lower wages.

Understand, I *want* you to get the green card too. We should just issue more green cards faster to tech workers if we need them. If there is an H-1B program, it should be a fast track toward permanent residency.

Concentrations of tech workers *create* jobs. That's why Facebook moved from Boston to the Bay Area. Boston has plenty of tech talent for a small company, but if you're planning on growing from a half dozen to thousands of tech employees in three or four years the Bay Area is arguably the only place you can do that. So why would we want to kick tech talent out of the country? Only to send their jobs with them.

This has nothing to do with protectionism. Nobody is saying not let foreign software into the country.

As for foreign labor, I have no objection to bringing foreign labor in. My objection is kicking that labor out after it has gained experience. If there really was a tech worker shortage, these are the very workers we'd want to stay.

What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas. And there's nothing special about American tech people; anything we can do can be done in India or Ukraine. That's fine, but I don't think the US government should be in the business of making it attractive for companies to move jobs overseas.

It's something so irrational (if we were to assume for the moment that the US government works for the welfare of the American people) there isn't even a word for it. It's the mirror image of protectionism. It's self-predation.

if you understand scalar assembly, understanding the basic "how" of vector/SIMD programming is conceptually similar

Actually, if you think back to pre-32bit x86 assembler, where the X registers (AX, BX) were actually addressable as half-registers (AH and AL were the high and low sections of AX), you already understand, to some extent, SIMD

SIMD just generalizes the idea that a register is very big (e.g. 512 bits), and the same operation is done in parallel to subregions of the register.

So, for instance, if you have a 512 bit vector register and you want to treat it like 64 separate 8 bit values, you could write code like follows:

C = A + B

If C, A, and B are all 512 bit registers, partitioned into 64 8 bit values, logically, the above vector/SIMD code does the below scalar code:

for (i == 1..64) {
    c[i] = a[i] + b[i]
}

If the particular processor you are executing on has 64 parallel 8-bit adders, then the vector code

C = A + B

Can run as one internal operation, utilizing all 64 adder units in parallel.

That's much better than the scalar version above - a loop that executes 64 passes..

A vector machine could actually be implemented with only 32 adders, and could take 2 internal ops to implement a 64 element vector add... that's still a 32x speedup compared to the scalar, looping version.

The Cray 1 was an amazing machine. It ran at 80mhz in 1976

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

According to WP, the only patent on the Cray 1 was for its cooling system...

Actually, I'm going to disagree here.

I spent the last 10 years working on the unglamorous parts of the MS stack that deal with writing business software. I worked on ERP systems (big stuff, big money) and small stuff (VS Lightswitch).

It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running.

Integrating with existing systems is notoriously hard. The larger a system is, the more likely you are to need a VAR/integrator for an industry specific vertical to build customizations for you.

There is absolutely a need for tooling to build business critical apps - forms over data, basic workflow, reliable data storage, etc.

It is possible to roll-your-own on each of these pieces, but it turns out that tailoring any of them for business app usage, much less stitching them all together into some sort of recipe or middleware... is hard.

However, the smaller the problem domain is, the larger the advantage in NOT trying to integrate or use off-the-shelf software.

With LightSwitch, you can write a 1-5 form productivity app in a few minutes that will let a small team of people do data entry, with basic validation and reliable storage underneath. This makes it great for volunteer organizations and other low time / low budget endeavours...

I'm very interested to see if other people have had positive experiences apart from Lightswitch... our customers tell us its the only tool quite like it... unless you go back to PowerBuilder or something along those lines...

Well, Windows 8 is a capable OS too. It's just got a somewhat awkward and unfamiliar graphical shell.

I don't even hate the Windows 8 shell; I pretty much take it for granted that modern desktop shells suck. That's because designers keep trying to get them to do more for users, when users don't really need *more*; they need the shell to do what they want, when they want it, and then stay the hell out of the way. On top of that there's the unfamiliarity. Windows has always UI problems with putting a cheery facade over a complex train wreck, but the fact that they keep changing the signposts.

I just roll with it. It's like learning to conjugate irregular verbs when you're mastering a language, only they keep changing them every few years. As an *OS*, apart from the somewhat confusing shell, I have no complaints about Windows 8, unlike Vista, whose aggressive "optimizations" broke a number of tools I use regularly. It's all increasingly peripheral, anyway, as more information is managed through the web. The desktop is no longer the focus of the user's experience, it's just a terminal.

I've heard this story, but it was after my time there. It's definitely in the classic style of MIT lame nerd humor. There's an often element of ironic self-deprecation in MIT humor.

Up until the 80s at least MIT had an archaic phone system in all the dorms. It was almost certainly maintained in part by student labor, since due to tuition costs most students had work study jobs -- often quite technical.