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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#91

Post by sammorrowdrums »

irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

I'd say most people hear divergence from their local accent, and consider theirs to be (at least subconsciously) a normal accent. This results in English people hearing my accent as a bit Irish, and Irish people hearing the English parts. Neither acknowledge fully the shared parts. In truth, I am a bit of both.

So I'd say a strong American accent to an Australian is the most divergent one, not one that somebody in US might consider strong.

Living in upstate New York I also frequently heard "oh, you have an accent" to which I always tried to explain "so do you", and several times I got the response that their accent was either neutral or closer to generic English.

It is amazing the subjective differences in how people experience accents, and how they feel about their own.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#92

Post by naruhodo »

irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

Speak through your nose and and lean heavily on the R sound wherever you find it.

Peter Sellers called Americans "The Herns" [1]:

> Various American characters with the surname Hern or Hearn, often used for narration, outrageous announcements or parody sales pitches. The Goons referred to Americans as "herns", possibly because saying "hern hern hern...." sounded American to them, possibly because Sellers once said that a decent American accent could be developed simply by saying it in between sentences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Goon_Show_cast_mem...

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#94

Post by _2d30 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

It's like your mouth was full of water - in contrast to British Received Pronunciation, which is like a mouth full of down feather. Also compare to "Hollywood Soviet English", which is like a dry mouth, but the tongue is filled with helium so it floats up, and then 'r' sounds like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar... .

I have absolutely zero ability to take your descriptions and convert them into an understanding of what you're trying to convey. Like what could this possibly mean???

> ...which is like a mouth full of down feather.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#95

Post by sam_lowry_ »

thundergolfer wrote: post #16

Thankfully the "DTrace expert" didn't turn out to be Bryan Cantrill. He's a big fan of Scott McNealy's engineering principles for Sun Microsystems, which includes "Don't Cheat", and the behaviour in this story very much seems not in the spirit of that principle. I wonder if this bit of 'cheating' ended up getting someone at Sun in trouble.

You do not know.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#96

Post by brendangregg »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #78
brendangregg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be…

Sun was the number one employer in town in Australia? What?!

Sorry, should have said "tech" employer, and this is referring to Sun and its ecosystem. A few years earlier I gave a talk to a local University about the job market and asked the comp sci students to have a showing of hands as to whether they thought they'd work on Windows or Solaris when they graduated. Most hands went for Windows. Then I showed the local job statistics: Sun Solaris was number one.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#98

Post by cperciva »

rubicon33 wrote: post #63
cperciva wrote: post #49

Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be cl…

I don't understand what bsdiff does, or is. I am a software developer and I frankly have no clue what I would ever use bsdiff for! I've read what it does (libraries for building and applying patches to binary files) and still don't really have a sense for what the purpose of this tool is. What are some real life use cases for it? When does a developer need such a tool?

Does it help if I tell you that bsdiff has saved end users somewhere over 10,000 years of waiting for software updates to download?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#99

Post by bilalhusain »

> I've learned ... instead to simply say "I have a lot of experience with that technology" and leave it at that.

Shows Brendan's maturity.

I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations.

Someone else can become more successful building on top of one's open source project. On a resume, a top contributor and a minor contributor to open source project might have same weightage depending on how you present it - making the situation unfair for a person dedicatedly working on a single project (quality) vs minor contributor to multiple projects (quantity).

But deleting name and credits is wrong. An acknowledgement from the benefitting person (if not the recognition/reward) has far more positive impact on career than justifying to other's that your work was stolen.

It was a bit strange to read some of the initial negative comments. I see Brendan being a sport. I would argue that reading the story as a report against unknown persons at Sun makes more sense. I don't see much sense in blaming victim. And, in my opinion, the VIP had a good run but he isn't the bad guy here.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#100

Post by Ice_cream_suit »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #37
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find it cringe? In NZ I think it's even more true than Australia. It's a tiny, isolated country with a small population that isn't the hub of anything really. Aussie and NZ compared to the US are completely different worlds in my eyes. (I'm a Kiwi btw)

See, at least you realize you are a tiny country with a small population and the ego adapted to that. I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead. We still assume that we radiate across the world and that our voice counts. It does not, and this has to be clear. There are countries that can influence events, but this is not ours. A typical example is how angry we were after the recent pi…

Your country does count.

France is a major actor in African and regional conflicts.

It is the third largest exporter of weapons ( After the USA and Russia ) to conflict zones.

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