Yes, Linus gave Nvidia the middle finger, and from a certain perspective it was for a good reason, but from another perspective, it's just "ranting".

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs. They also have a tendency to release support for a new xorg-server well after the server has been released, thus forcing those of us on the bleeding edge to wait. On the otherhand, they help support the open source drivers, which is great. But, the open source drivers lag behind, so if you're a gamer and dual boot to Windows and have a great ATI/AMD card, it may not work properly under the Linux open source drivers or with a bleeding edge distro with the latest and greatest xorg-server.

Otherwise, if you want "gamer-grade" graphics, you basically have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Both have their tradeoffs.

If you don't care about gamer-grade graphics cards, Intel drivers are open source, well maintained, and the new sandy bridge and ivy bridge graphics are more than good enough for almost anything but gaming (they're okay for low to mid-low end gaming but that's about it).

My solution is a thinkpad w520 with optimus graphics. I use optimus graphics under windows when I want to game (quadro 2000m) and use the integrated intel graphics for linux with bbswitch to disable the nvidia gpu so my battery life doesn't suck. But it really does boil down to, do you want to game? If so, you have no choice but a proprietary driver or not-up-to-snuff open source driver. If not, stick with onboard Intel. Decent graphics performance and much better battery life than most discrete solutions.

I used to work for a hearing aid company in IT.
The most expensive programmable digital hearing aid with all the options topped out at around $1200. That's the cost to the hearing care professional. So yeah, that hearing aid would turn around and sell for at least 3 to 4 times that.

Also, the company had an extended warranty that we sold to the hearing care professional. Most of them don't turn around and sell that to the customer. Instead, they pay for it themselves and then when a customer brings a hearing aid back they sent it to us for free to fix and they charged the customer for it. It seemed like quite a nice racket. Especially when you consider they also charge for the hearing checkup, fitting, and all of that other usual crap above and beyond what the hearing aid itself cost.

I'm not sure what the rest of the medical device industry looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was fairly similar. I know the markup on my glasses frames is pretty crazy.

I agree with most of what you say, about things being better remembered than they actually were. I was an avid comic book collector as a kid and teenager, and over the past decade have re-collected all the comics from those days and re-reading them is more for nostalgia than anything else.

That said, this is exactly why x-men first class succeeded. They paid lip service to the overall theme which is pretty much archetypal (mutants = [insert your oppressed minority here]) and basic archetypal relationship between certain characters (prof x and magneto being yin and yang).

But beyond that, they brought in characters that most outside of the avid fans really don't know alot about and re-imagined them in a way that made it both fresh and new, and yet for those of us who have been x-men fans for decades, it was enough that we were able to connect them, accept the differences and enjoy them.

I for one really liked x-men: first class. it wasn't X2 good, but it was still an awesome movie. I'm also willing to accept non-earth-616-canon depictions of characters.

If you had taken a little more time to do some research you would have found that the Sun DS product you linked to (now called Oracle DS EE) is a rebranding of the Sun DS 7.0. This is not OpenDS. OpenDS was slated to be the next generation replacement for the Sun DS . While OpenDS has not been officially canned, the project has had significant setbacks with developers leaving or being let go and commits to it have slowed down considerably since Oracle took over.

And same thing with OpenSSO. Had you done a little bit of research you would have found that Oracle has removed all downloads for the OpenSSO product leaving only the source code, which yes, for an open source project, that is the guts, but Oracle dismantling the downloads and effectively no longer supporting the previous downloads is the same as killing the project.

I don't consider this a slashvertisement. I consider this a very good commentary on the strengths of open source, the bumpy road of the Oracle purchase of Sun, and a good example of how a good product can continue on with it's open source roots and succeed without having to compromise on those open source roots.

How was the parent modded insightful?

I graduated from college 10+ years ago, and yeah, two semesters of English may have been the norm, but that doesn't mean that foreign students don't need dictionaries. Hell, half of my professors and TAs barely spoke English and nearly needed translators (in some cases the TAs WERE the translators).

With technology the way it's gotten, I can totally understand internet connected devices being used as the norm for translation now.

I'm a little disappointed at the somewhat narrow view of language and the world that alot of people seem to have.

Stan Lee did the same. His contract with Marvel gives him 10% of the profits for various Marvel comics characters such as Spider-Man. He won his lawsuit in 2005 for the first spider-man movie because Marvel Entertainment claimed that the 10% was after production and "distribution" costs. I understand production costs, but the article here basically describes the scam behind "distirbution" costs.

I'm not certain Google ever truly wanted to be in the phone market. It makes sense for google to want a reference platform for their employees, for developers and to spur the market for the android PLATFORM (this is the key). But Google really isn't a hardware vendor.

When the Nexus One was released, the motorola droid wasn't out yet, the closest competitor to the iPhone on android was the mytouch 3g and HTC hero on sprint (i'm referring to US market not european market).

I don't know if the Nexus One actually accelerated any plans, or what, but now, there's a whole bunch of decent android phones that can actually compete with the iPhone.

Google doesn't need the Nexus One on verizon, and likely doesn't want it. The Droid, Droid Eris and Droid Incredible are all much better suited for the purpose because Verizon supports the phones fully, sells the phones and they are all excellent Android experience phones.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Nexus One for Sprint never materializes either, since the Evo 4G is not that far out.

Google doesn't need to sell the Nexus One everywhere for it to be a success. They just need android to be a viable platform on all of the major wireless providers, and it's definitely shaping up to be that way now.

All too often, Java programmers have no idea what it means to be running within the JVM. They don't understand how the garbage collector works (just that it does, but it doesn't always does it?). They don't understand the differences between the different gc models. There's very little understanding of what the difference is between the various generations in the generational garbage collector, or what the difference is between native heap and vm heap.

Also, understanding how the JIT compiler works, how the Java threading model works, and how to write thread safe code. Also, just because code looks thread-safe doesn't mean it is without appropriate uses of volatile keyword. Learn why the doublecheck idiom isn't safe until Java 5 and higher.

There are alot of people out there who can write Java code. By understanding the VM, you can hope to write better Java code.

There's a difference between being fired and laid off. Even then, there's no silver bullet, but there're many many things you can do to stack the odds in your favor. I think what I do is one thing good to have the your repertoire.

I like that term. Yup, dive catching describes it well, and right, it's not about letting it fail, or letting it fester, but just getting in and getting the job done. In the end, myself, and some of the more astute observers might be able to figure out the root cause, but there's no reason to draw attention to it. Even those that I jokingly call incompetent aren't really incompetent, they just have a different skill set, and mine and theirs complement each other very well.

Definitely, pointing fingers and being an utter ass about picking up the pieces is not the right way to go about what I do.

That's why I put a smiley after that comment.
You do it politically correct by not pointing the finger. You just solve the problem. The reality is, you're solving a problem someone else caused :)

You do it right, the mutineers think they did a great job. Their continued ability to do a poor job keeps me working :)

In my experience, when a developer is involved on a customer escalation, it becomes political and not technical. When a developer is asked for by name it becomes 90% political and 10% technical.

In those cases, upper management and executives just want it to go away. Thus if you can make it go away, they don't care if you were requested by name or not :).

That's just my experience working and talking with people at large (1000-2500+ employee) software companies. I imagine that in smaller, and even large but more politically motivated organizations this could piss people off. I make it a rule to try not to work with those organizations but yes, you're right, there are cases where this may not work but it's done wonders for my career so far :).

A corollary to my original post is also that developers need to be able to talk to customers and not get a blank stare or the "whoosh" look on their faces (if in person) or pause (if on the phone). 90% of my task is setting expectations, making people understand what's happening in a way that doesn't confuse them, and 10% of it is actually getting the technical work done.

I've been a software engineer at the company I'm at for about 7 years now. Was in technical support before that (enterprise level development support).

Here's my solution to not being fired. Make yourself damn good at solving the difficult customer problems no one else can solve. Do it so that customers and executives at your own company request you by name (executives at a customer knowing you by name can help here too). Yes, it makes life somewhat miserable when those ugly ass escalations come in, but you know what, when customers and company exeuctives ask for you by name because you did a great job solving problem xyz 3 months ago and saved a multi-million dollar deal, middle management will think twice about being the one to tell company executives, uhh, that person was fired last month.

Screw making deadlines, I miss deadlines all the time and haven't been fired yet. Why? Because instead of working toward my deadlines I'm saving multi-million dollar deals that could get lost because of other people's incompetence :). It's a great way for job security, and I love troubleshooting, even if the escalations are a pain in the ass.

googlewatch.com has existed for nearly 6 years now. The potential for evil in Google has been questioned for at least the last half decade. I recall concerns over google's "do no evil" surviving their IPO and that about 5 years ago.

Half a decade in technology is near a couple of lifetimes in other industries.

Some may disagree with the need to scrutinize Google to the extend that others do, but personally, I'm glad people do things like this, even if it occasionally raises a false alarm. Any organization with access to the type of data Google has needs watchdogs.

Crossover has been doing this for a while now. I've been running Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 under it for work. I even purchased crossover myself to use at work because of their awesome licence policy basically saying:
        a. run the Software on any computer, so long as no more than one person per license is ever using the Software at any one time.

Otherwise, these guys provide a great service to the linux community with their work on wine, and their prices are very reasonable. I can't stress enough how worth it I think giving these guys money so that I can do much of my work in a Linux world and do it easily without having to jump through the hoops of dealing with a straight Wine configuration.