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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#101

Post by BrissyCoder »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #41
BrissyCoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a myth that NZ "punches above it's weight" is all. Show me some empirical evidence if you disagree. I'm a Kiwi too - but living in Aus.

I think there are lower expectations of Aus/NZ because they're relatively small and out-of-the-way countries (Maybe less so for Aussie), so it's surprising how often they seem to excel in things. The obvious examples that come to mind would be sports. NZ excels in Sailing, Cricket and Rugby against much larger countries. Though it could be that in general, Aus/NZ have the same skill distribution as other countries, b…

I knew someone was going to mention the sailing... suprised no one brought up Lord of the Rings.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#103

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bilalhusain wrote: post #99

> 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 m…

> 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.

Start recording; have them, a big multinational with a massive legal department, admit to violating and stripping a license from source code. Then sue them. They should know better, and they're making billions off of other people's work. That in itself is fair enough, if the license permits it, but removing the license is crossing the line.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#104

Post by _l4jh »

I have a similar experience to this myself.

A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm.

I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never developed them on company time or resources. They were released as open source.

Fast forward 6 months and we had a meeting with a virtualisation consultancy trying to sell us some tools to assist in a wider P2V programme. We had a sales guy and a tech guy visit to show us their stuff. After half an hour of them talking up all they can offer the tech guy fired up a tool and I instantly recognised it was my tool but with some rebranding.

My manager looked at me slightly confused as he recognised it too. I let them continue for a few minutes to properly confirm my suspicions then mentioned that this tool was in fact a tool we already use. They were very confused until I loaded up my version on a remote system to show them.

Needless to say the rest of the presentation was extremely awkward. I believe these two gentlemen thought they were in fact their own tools developed in house. It turned out several of "their" tools were in fact rebranded versions of mine.

I would love to say there was some kind of exciting conclusion but in reality all that happened was they were clearly spooked by this as their/my tools were removed and never included again in their P2V toolkit.

I suspect the moment they left the meeting with us they called to report what happened and rather than risk me following up (not sure how I could do that to be perfectly honest, it was FOSS after all just not used the proper way) they decided it would be safer to just pull these non-critical tools. They were just "nice to haves" anyway.

My boss excitedly share the experience with the team and we had a good laugh about it and how the sales guy went from Mr Confident to stammering and stressed in a matter of seconds.

We never did buy their toolkit.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#105

Post by throw14082020 »

cperciva wrote: post #98
rubicon33 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yea well thats not enough! Xcode should be using it too. They make us download 12GB for every update.

/s end open source entitlement section

Thanks for your great work

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#106

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Something I should be aware of; in Go programming, they sometimes encourage you to just copy some code instead of add another dependency. However, if you copy code from a codebase with a certain license, you should, if everything is above board, include the license as well then for that bit of code.

I mean in practice it's tiny utilities that I'm too lazy to reimplement in the exact same way, but still, it's something to keep in mind.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#107

Post by brendangregg »

throwawaye3735 wrote: post #42
anyfoo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Gregg has a lot of clout. Besides that, he did eventually work at Sun proper, and later Joyent. I have no reason not to believe his account.

I am not saying it's factually incorrect. My point is that it includes a lot of Gregg's personal feelings (and maybe was informed incorrectly about the situation) and I'm just not sold that the guy who was assigned to show off Dtrace was the bad guy here

In the article I included my guess about real cause for this: Sun's assumption that any good work had to be from a Sun employee. I'd guess the sequence of events was:

  - DTrace is the new hotness, we need it in our UI.
  - Everyone's using Brendan's tools, let's add them (so far, so good).
  - Oh, why do they say copyright Brendan? He made a mistake: Sun employees should be putting copyright Sun on them. (THIS is the mistake, as I wasn't a Sun employee).
  - I'll just delete his name and stick copyright Sun on them all.
  - Developer gets picked to go do a world tour (and may genuinely not know what happened).
As for how I was treated: I guessed why in the article as well, the low-key introduction as is the norm in Australia.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#108

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

To offer some off-topic support: France is indisputably a cultural giant -- tourism, food, TV/film (Canal+!), the arts. Do not underestimate that!

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#109

Post by TeMPOraL »

_2d30 wrote: post #94
TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pillow filling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather

This means speaking soft, muffled words - roughly the way you'd sound if you had your mouth full of something soft. Like feather. Or food.

Not a perfect analogy, but hey, works as a hash for an accent, at least among the people I know locally.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#110

Post by exidy »

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?

For me, if the speaker uses two syllables for "and", it's a strong American accent.
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