I have to say it’s kinda comical to read blogs and ML postings lately, after I have bascially been saying all this months ago. I was kinda put aside as a blathering idiot, though.
Now I realize it was probably because I just wanted some consensus. Which wasn’t the opportune thing at that point due to all the head bashing, flaming and other stuff that has no names.
Well, I don’t blame anybody. I probably just joined at the most unfavorable time. Too bad, really.
One day, I am sure, the world is going to debate itself to death over the direction the top of a dog’s poo is pointing to. There will be a turning point when the last tremor of evolution comes to a grinding halt. From that point on, the world will stop circling around the sun and instead just circle around itself forever. People on said earth are going to circle around their individual selves forever. Better yet, there will be ‘group self circling’, fueled by the internet proudly acting as flame war superconductor. Forever.
The good news, of course, is that all the commerce suits will be happy forever. When the last brain cell has ceased to produce anything but shop-soiled dirt, the world will be heaven for those guys.
Why would we be different?
To be honest, it saddens me to see how much energy is wasted on territorial “boxing” behaviour. It’s probably just a law of nature. Entropy grows – there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Just imagine all this energy spent doing interesting things. Oh boy, we had probably colonized half of the known galaxy by now! [Editor’s note: Whether that is a Good Thing (TM) is debatable.]
I makes me wonder what the difference between a real war and a flame war is. Maybe it’s nothing more than cowardice to bash your opponent’s head with a mace. Maybe it’s just the fear to be the loser of a penis size comparison [look in your mailbox to find a cure for that].
The thing is, you’re not alone. That, dear reader, is a a fact you have to face. Now, if you look at somebody other than your mirror self, you might notice he or she looks different. From your mirror self, that is. What you might not notice is that he or she also *thinks* different. Now, what makes you think your own thoughts are more ‘right’ then his/hers? By what standard? Regarding what background? If you use that strange matter in your head for something else besides trying to defend your own useless boxed thinking you might realize you actually can’t answer that question.
At this point, I am quite sure, somebody from #gentoo-pr is going to add ‘(uncurable)’ to the note saying “frilled: esoteric”. Heh. Well, life’s a bit^H^Heach. Rest assured I appreciate your work a _lot_ .-)
Boxed thinking leads nowhere except to conflict. By defending your pretty little box you do not only deny your own chance of further development, you also provoke hostile reactions from other box-thinkers and cause major annoyance to the others.
You will not accomplish anything meaningful, though.
Now, for those barking “What the heck has this got to do with Gentoo?”, feel free to stab me on IRC if you can’t figure it out. Or by mail. Or, even better, in person. That, unfortunately, might require leaving your box for a minute. I’m (not really) sorry for that.
I need to rant. Again ^^.
I’m so pestered by “Web 2.0”. Or should I say AJAX. Or whatever you want to call it.
As a software developer, I learnt that you need a strong foundation to put your complex code on. Now, look at the Web 2.0. We don’t even have a platform, since it only exists in the minds of people and some documents. What we really have is [**BLEEP*CENSORED**] browsers that do things their own way with no sign of stability or coherence. And upon that, people, you build your applications?
Ho, ho, ho. Now I have a machine gun.
Since then, I got used to ignore 95% of sites that require JabbaScript and Gookies. It’s all turned off except for some sites I really fancy. The others that I visit on a regular basis do work without. My own ones do as well, of course.
I can see the pain … I have worked with IBM 3270 terminal technology, and that was even dumber than HTML1 forms. But I am convinced we took the wrong turn at some junction back in the past. OTOH, who knows – CORBA virtually died [it does seem to have some lazarus ambition, though], maybe AJAX will go the same way once developer’s minds settle on something feasible again.
I just hope.
You’re not actually still reading this, are ya?
Ok, after ranting I feel much better B)
Now, I wish to officially thank some devs for their suppport and for bearing with my stupid questions and failures:
jaervosz, koon and dercorny as well as solar “the cool”, plasmaroo, taviso and vorlon, of course, for everything ^^. I really enjoy what we do however small it may be, and I hope we will always get better. An extra hug to plasmaroo for responding to major nags! (Falco, you’re included, too 🙂
wolf31o2 and stuart, for withstanding and still helping me 🙂
kloeri, for being so easy … all things in life should be like this!
christel and chriswhite, for not making me lose that smiling face altogether ;D
dberkholz, for gently not-recognizing my n00b efforts 😉
beandog, yo man! (he, he)
swift, for getting me on board *grin*
Out of line, I also have to thank SeJo for all the censored stuff [lol].
Now, everybody sadly not mentioned here is invited to poke me on IRC – whenever you see fit 🙂
Thanks, guys & girls, it’s been fun so far, it still is, and I hope it will be in the future!
When the setuid() bug hit vixie-cron I was sure we were going to have a lot more of those exploits in the near future. It seems I was too pessimistic, though; there were only one or two discovered since then, although I think auditors will keep an eye on that from now on. Anyway, I’d like to recommend some (IMHO) good reading:
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/ddean/papers/usenix02.pdf
Update: Next in line is mit-krb5 … more to come, I guess 🙁
Well, I’ve had it. Enough of the Oblivion hype, that is. You’d probably argue that an old fart like me [he he] shouldn’t be playing games anymore, but I still do, from time to time.
Less often, lately, du to the increasingly fast downfall of the games industry. The best example for that has been Oblivion, which demonstrates the complete menace called the game industry today.
Oblivion is the successor the the rather successfull RPG Morrowind. When Morrowind was released it was critically acclaimed one of (if not the) best RPGs ever, and players all over the world followed that sentiment, despite obvious glaring problems (most of which have never been resolved).
Oblivion set out to redefine the genre again, and, according to games magazines and online media, succeeded. That, unfortunately, only shows how all the stuff works together these days.
First of all, the game itself. The graphics, you may have heard of it, are nice. But not *too* nice, actually. The reportedly jaw-dropping moment you step out of the sewers failed to drop my jaw. Only after installing some big texture replacements I felt me jaw move a little. If you have seen the NPC faces you’ll know how to define “ugly”. Those are, if it was reported correctly, 128×128 textures, and they look like I-won’t-say-what on my 21 inch display running 1600×1200.
Then there’s the game mechanics. The Morrowind system was dumbed down somewhat, which in itself probably wasn’t such a bad idea. But Bethesda managed to retain some *really* useless stuff in there, so maybe they dumbed down the wrong things …
Then there’s the console port. Usually, when I see a PC game with a console version I avoid it like the plague. Should have done that with Oblivion, too. Everything is just GIANT (as to be of any use on a TV screen), making for example the inventory a bad joke with like 7 entries displayed at once. Another mod needed (actually, I used two) to make it bearable. And I could rant about the mind-blowing stupidity of “minigames” for about 12,000 more characters. Which I won’t.
What Bethesda didn’t fix is the level(l)ing mechanics. It’s basically still the same stuff Morrowind suffered from; getting multipliers completely distracts from game immersion … there’s another mod to fix it, though I didn’t try it.
The worst thing of all, though, ist the new “leveled content” system. It’s the laugh of the century. It basically does nothing else than keep your progress in a very small corridor, and completely takes away any good RPG experience, since you really can’t get in over your head, except by messing up your character build (since the leveling system is supposed to feel “natural”, but to really benefit from it you have to put a lot of thought into it). So you can basically go anywhere at any point in time and don’t have to fear you’re not prepared for the challenge. A good thing if you don’t like surprises and need something to lull you into sleep. Oh, I forgot that your special quest rewards are leveled to your character, so anything interesting you do early on leaves you with a kid’s weapon or armor later.
I have to admit that some of the quests are really the best any RPG has ever seen, especially the Thieves’ ones. But, after I played my first (and only) character through all guild quests, the main quest, and virtually all other quests (there may be a handfull that I missed) … there’s nothing left to do. My character execlled in everything – without cheating, of course – so what’s left to discover? Nothing. That didn’t happen with Morrowind. But now, my copy of Oblicion is for sale, since I saw it all – and it was quite shallow.
Which brings us back to the beginning – why was this game hyped so much? Probably the result of good PR (and a prior success). To understand that you have to understand how the media works, at least (but not limited to) the gaming sector. If a magazine (print or online) pisses off a distributor, they won’t get ads and reviewer’s copies (often beta versions). If you don’t get reviewer’s copies, you’re bascially out of business, since everybody else writes how great a game is, only you can’t. If you don’t get ads … well, figure that out for yourself .-) So, you can’t afford to piss them off (only the minor players who are still happy to be mentioned at all) … ’nuff said. Plus, you usually get to review beta versions that don’t tell you about the quality of the finished product. The german version of Oblivion, for example, reportedly suffers from extremely bad text translations. The voiceovers seem to be fine (the german distributor managed that), but the text seems to be a major mess (Bethesda managed that). No german media hinted to that, since they all had english copies to review only. (Luckily, I played the english version .-)
Resume? The industry is in shambles and there’s little hope. Mosnters of money grinding like WoW are going to dominate the future. Let’s see whether there’s hope (like a small developer like Piranha Bytes with Gothic III) …
Since SearchSecurity’s ranking is dragging some attention, I’d like to share my opionion. Though being part of the security team I can only present my personal point of view (as always in this blog .-).
You can doubt or disagree with the ranking in any form you like, and there may be some strange points in there. But that, frankly, is not important.
What is important is to ask how good we do compared to how good we can do . And then make changes accordingly
First of all, note that we will not be able to deal with vulnerabilities like Ubuntu. Or other companies that pay their employees for doing that stuff. We’re community-based. People spend their time digging into vulnerabilities, getting new ebuilds ready and testing them in their free time.
Second, we do have a lot more architectures than other distros to care about. Not all are supported security-wise, but still, it’s a nice list if you want to make an impression.
Third, fixes are often available way ahead of any GLSA. That is not true for every arch, it is not true for any case, and it is not generally true .-) Still, users who update often are indeed not so seldomly protected even if no GLSA has been issued yet. The GLSA is only the last step in the whole process.
That being said, it should be clear we are not aiming to be #1 on that list.
But there’s things we could make better.
All this may, of course, be complete bull from someone who hasn’t been around long enough, at least from a dev’s perspective. And I don’t want all that “in there” like I wrote it. Nevertheless it might get one or two of you to think about it, poke me in the eye and suggest something better. Please!
I’ll try to make it short this time and share some experience I’ve had with the ‘new user’ side.
I run Gentoo on multiple servers and workstations. It is by far the best manageable Linux on the planet. Here’s the pros & cons:
Gentoo is not a ‘dumb user’ distro, and I guess we all know that, and I guess we’re not really aiming for that, either. Nevertheless, we still fall a small step short of what we can do for the ‘educated user’, what is what I’d call the Gentoo target. If we can push it a little more, we’re on solid ground. I think it’s amazing how mature this project has become already.
Nevertheless, I’d like to remind everybody that we should not ignore users with low level of expertise. Our forums are known as one of the top resources to get Linux help. Our users are known to be helpful, our devs are know to be skillful. There is no need to ignore the lower end, and, seeing that the 2006 releases contain a graphical installer (didn’t try it, though), it seems we aren’t, either.
So, in my opinion, we should do whatever is possible to help new users (and gain new users, in that regard). I’m about to discuss some ideas with the re-formed PR project and we’ll see how that goes. My two cents are simply: Don’t redline somebody when in doubt, only when you’re sure you have very good reasons .-)
-frilled (hmm, was that ‘short’?)
First of all, welcome everybody – and thanks for your welcome to a new dev.
I was going to write something about the commotion in the dev community, but then I figured it’s not much use. We need to sort things out, and there is little need to comment on that.
What I would like to talk about is making things better. Change is an integral and unavoidable part of life. It’s natural that some people turn away from a project and new people join. Those come with new ideas, and, over time, the global goal may shift and change. It’s not something that comes from above, but evolves from the inside. At least when there’s no big boss sitting on a high chair.
Things that don’t change usually don’t live. There are some notable exceptions, but the general rule is, you better change if you want to live. Even if it sucks, what it often enough does. I can’t imagine how many times I wished that somebody would just stop. But they won’t, and if you don’t move, they’ll wash you away sooner or later.
So why am I wallowing in all this oh so great wisdom? We’re not going to solve any of the world’s problems. We have lots of great developers dedicating enormous amounts of time to the project. We have a great user community that is recognized for being helpful and friendly. So what’s the problem? What do we need to make better?
I think we need to take a step back. What I heard a couple of times now is “I don’t wont to spend time on that *** crap, I simply want … to develop”. I also heard a lot of “We should do …”.
Once principle of an effective project is to let everybody do what he/she is best at and only enforce a minimum of behavioral and communication standards. You better live with the various types of people you have instead of trying to change them (there we are again) since they can only do that on their own.
Today I was talking about PR and raised the question “How do we define Gentoo?” That may sound like one of those esoteric things nobody cares about, and I don’t expect anybody to care about it. But from my p.o.v. it’s interesting. Can we actually promote Gentoo? Since we are “The Meta Distribution”, is there a common base? Enterprise stability freaks, tech fans, gadget lovers, ricers, we got them all – users and devs. On what common ground can we present ourselves to the world?
Now, if I follow my own words the answer is clear: let everybody do his/her “job”, dead simple. There are people who see fit to promote Gentoo. But can we just let them? Would you – as a developer or a user – trust those people to represent you in any way? A handful of people to funnel what hundreds of dedicated people are all about? In an enterprise setting, this is not a question. The management has a “vision” (ehrm … sometimes … as blurred as it might be), and that’s it. We, on the other hand, don’t have a management, which is probably why we have any developers at all .-)
Still, I sincerely think all we need is some glue to keep all those brilliant people together. This will sound like a very bad idea to some of you, since it might resemble some kind of “elite”, “structure” or “authority”. But I am not thinking about authority. I am thinking about a common agreement that (mostly) everybody can live with, that will have to be refined constantly(!), but will, in it’s respective form, be transported to the world without interruption from individuals. This sounds stupidly theoretic, but if you think about it for 30 seconds, you’ll see that all the tools are there. We just need to use them accordingly. And then let everybody to what they do best. And stop worrying.