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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

411–420 of 478 posts

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one reply in that flame war is still hilarious so many years later. To anyone who didn't get the reference of Putnam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

wow, that’s one helluva response. HN in 2007 seems like a wonderful place

I like the part where someone calls cperciva's idea bad, he says what's bad about it then the founder of Dropbox replies saying they're just starting and it sounds like they're in the same space.

Pretty good bad idea

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#412
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know a user is on version 3 and need to update to version 5, then why not just send out all the patches between 3 and 5? Why do you need to generate a new patch for each pair of versions. It feels a bit egregious when I have to download a 100MB update just because a few characters were buffed or nerfed. More involved changes end up being over 1GB.

Because it's not just version 3 to version 5, it's version 3 to version 84. Not all versions are made equal either - one might be a character buff, another might reorder assets in the "big huge binary blob file" for performance improvements. At a certain point, rather than downloading 30MB per update for 25 versions, and applying each incrementally (remember that you have to do them in order too), just download the f…

I'd personally like to see a company put a little thought into innovating how they store data on disk so patches can be quickly applied like with git while also not requiring a full source recompilation.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AY-und" Edit: another example: "door" => "DOH-ur"

Interesting. I don't pronounce either of those that way. I wonder what region of the country uses these pronunciations?

Those are traits of some Southern and Appalachian accents.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#414
post #370
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA does say the code was under GPLv2 and CDDL. I would say it’s entirely within your right to distribute it in accordance with what the GPL FAQ considers okay, which includes internal distribution however you want. License header is required when distributing externally.

Oh weird, read over that line. Removes one of my bullet points but doesn't change the result. I agree you can distribute it internally, i.e. you can pass around the hard drive with the single unmodified copy. You can't make copies of it without the header, regardless of whether you keep it internal.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo...

> Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?

> The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not know.

It feels like Cantrill being a creator of DTrace earns at least the credibility to be called a 'DTrace expert' without quotation marks.

Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391764

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#416

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…

Wouldn’t you have made significant bank if you had sued? To the extent that you never had to work for a paycheck ever? Just curious if a lawyer consult might have been useful.

Brendan has "made more bank" since then than he could have made in that one suit or since that suit if he'd filed it. Brendan's a pretty big shot nowadays and is almost certainly very well compensated, but when you demonstrate that you're too happy to sue you tend to get discriminated against, so if he had sued... it might have ended his career.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#417

To be honest, Sun's whole culture treated software as an afterthought - which is part of the reason they ended up where they did

That's not true. I was there, and I was there at the time. Sun had a lot of problems, but software was not an afterthought, at least not within the Solaris org.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#418
post #414
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh weird, read over that line. Removes one of my bullet points but doesn't change the result. I agree you can distribute it internally, i.e. you can pass around the hard drive with the single unmodified copy. You can't make copies of it without the header, regardless of whether you keep it internal.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo... > Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public? > The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified vers…

Yes, I'm not arguing otherwise.

You're not free to make copies without the license. You are free to make copies with the license, because that's what the license granted you permission to do. You aren't free to do so without preserving the license, because you don't have a license to do that and that's copyright infringement.

You aren't required to publicly release derivative works or their source, simply because the license grants you the ability to produce derivative works (provided you keep the copyright information intact) without publicly releasing them. You are required to keep the copyright information intact, because the license does not grant you permission to produce derivative works if you do not.

The requirement to keep the copyright information attached is simply not connected to your choice to distribute it or not. It's a requirement any time you make a copy or make a derivative work, even if you're only making that copy or derivative work for yourself.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#419
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great concept in theory, but in practice...find me the email list for Google Photos. Or Google Keep. These are two Google products that I use daily (including paying for one!)

Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. My point was that there are often public mailing lists, where engineers with real engineering problems could discuss those problems with the engineers responsible for the product/service; and yet the engineer with the problem nevertheless doesn't even think of using the mailing list to reach out, but instead decides to go through regular customer-service suppor…

I've also got serious problems (as in, the service we're paying real money for is totally broken) solved by contacting a friend who worked at $BIG_COMPANY and the friend escalating internally.

The point is that I shouldn't have to bypass the official channels that way. These organisations are operating at the level of ad-hoc individual heroics, which is the lowest tier in terms of organisational maturity. In a start-up where everyone has to do everything and no-one has worked anything out yet, that's completely understandable. In a many-billions-of-dollars business with enough influence that someone's quality of life or the viability of some other business could be profoundly affected if the giant screwed up, we should be demanding better by now.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#420

I had a vaguely similar experience. I was working on virtual reality race car simulators that used sophisticated custom designed and built motion platforms. I had several responsibilities, the first was the software that controlled the motion platform. When it was done, and I proceeded to the sound effects system, my boss turned over my motion platform code to his good friend who he had brought on to the project with…

What made him think that it would fly, especially with you present in the same meeting?

I really don’t know. I did not embarrass him in the meeting but we had a smaller group talk later
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