[rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 169, Issue 34

Sat Dec 17 12:28:48 CST 2016

Liam notes:

Linux may not be particularly good in any single way, but its licence
and its cost outweigh technical elegance. I'm afraid that's the
reality.

 Shades of certain complaints leveled at UNIX in the '80s. I do note that Linux doesn't seem to be getting better quite as fast as UNIX did.

Re: ChromeOS. You can do more on it than merely Google Docs. Scratch Jr. runs on it which I would love to use with my kindergarten kids. For very good reasons the school district has chosen not to pour money into Chromebooks, preferring to get full-function laptops, and unfortunately Scratch Jr. doesn't run on anything but ChromeOS, Android or iOS. Tablets could be great, but they're expensive and a management nightmare.

-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Sat, Dec 17, 2016 10:00 am
Subject: rescue Digest, Vol 169, Issue 34

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question   (must fix
      - SPARC damnit :-) ) (Meelis Roos)
   2. Re: Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question  (must fix
      - SPARC damnit :-) ) (Liam Proven)
   3. Re: Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question   (must fix
      - SPARC damnit :-) ) (Doug McIntyre)
   4. Re: Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question   (must fix
      - SPARC damnit :-) ) (Sandwich Maker)
   5. Re: Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question  (must fix
      - SPARC damnit :-) ) (Andrew Jones)
   6. Re: sparc10 cpu - what to do. (Sandwich Maker)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 11:41:31 +0200 (EET)
From: Meelis Roos <mroos at linux.ee>
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question
	(must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.20.1612171124001.18313 at math.ut.ee>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

> Well said, and from my perspective, very true.

Yes, agreed - I liked the wet paint analogue very much.

But I do not see it as "kinds having no discipline" - it's rather a 
different approach taken to the development process to help with scaling 
of development.

In a small and controlled team you can force the focus on some spewcific 
features and polish these features until they are done. But you can not 
scale that model out to lots of developers and lots of features - at 
least not with developer doingit for their own fun.

To scale the scope with enthusiast developers, you can do most of the 
feature development easily but yoiu have to leave the tail of quality 
control to someone more motivated. Linux has selected the model of 
bleeding edge and fast developing upstream kernel that is released when 
it seems good enough to thew developers, and then distribution makers 
try to scale out the testing and stabilization. Some have busoiness 
models that can put more reources into it, some use more crowdsourcing 
for testing, bus ocassionally thre "wet paint" gets though (Ijust saw it 
with container memory management reclaiming problem).

> > > Linux.  There is nothing -really- wrong with Linux. It's a little
> > > utilitarian. Almost too much of a good thing. It's in our TV's and in
> > > our phones. Who thought that was going to happen 20 years ago? It seems
> > > to take up new features pretty quick, and the paint is always a bit wet,
> > > either in the kernel, applications or even within the distribution.  I
> > > think it's always been like that, and I'm not convinced it will ever be
> > > better.  The paint around a feature will cure, but there is always wet
> > > paint somewhere.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 15:13:27 +0100
From: Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question
	(must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )
Message-ID:
	<CAMTenCFMxabSGy4uexMsQMYUafX-ynTjYTdGQQHnUf=o+deUoQ at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On 17 December 2016 at 06:29, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:
> But the
> year of the Linux desktop is always a year away, and the Linux graphics
> stack and desktop experience remain mediocre at best.

Meanwhile in the real world...

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/7/25/platform-wars-final-score

2.5 billion Android -- i.e. Linux users -- as of a year ago.

Now, approximately half the human race owns or uses Linux.

Meanwhile, in laptops etc.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outsold-macs-us-idc-fi
gures

ChromeOS is the #2 most widely-used PC OS in the world, after Windows.

Only about 8 million units, if Q1 was 2M, but still.

Linux may not be particularly good in any single way, but its licence
and its cost outweigh technical elegance. I'm afraid that's the
reality.

--
Liam Proven b" Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk b" Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven b" Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 b" DR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 09:11:24 -0600
From: Doug McIntyre <merlyn at geeks.org>
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question
	(must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )
Message-ID: <20161217151124.GB20785 at geeks.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 03:13:27PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> Meanwhile, in laptops etc.
> 
> http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outsold-macs-us-idc-fi
> gures
> 
> ChromeOS is the #2 most widely-used PC OS in the world, after Windows.

Although, as the article starts to say, all these Chromebooks are
dumped into K-12 schools as throw away "starter" computers. They give
them access to Google docs, and do nothing else. Almost anything else
my kids do in school is on a Mac or iPad.

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 10:14:37 -0500 (EST)
From: adh at an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker)
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question
	(must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )
Message-ID: <201612171514.uBHFEbh8003973 at tiamat.an.bradford.ma.us>

" From: Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
" 
" []
" 
" Linux may not be particularly good in any single way, but its licence
" and its cost outweigh technical elegance. I'm afraid that's the
" reality.

the marketplace triumphs again.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler         is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 11:00:28 -0500
From: Andrew Jones <andrew at jones.ec>
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question
	(must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )
Message-ID: <d43b82cd-05b6-dc1d-22ba-a39a87fe97e1 at jones.ec>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

On 12/17/2016 04:41 AM, Meelis Roos wrote:
> In a small and controlled team you can force the focus on some spewcific
> features and polish these features until they are done. But you can not
> scale that model out to lots of developers and lots of features - at
> least not with developer doingit for their own fun.
>
> To scale the scope with enthusiast developers, you can do most of the
> feature development easily but yoiu have to leave the tail of quality
> control to someone more motivated.

Most Linux code is written by professionals, not enthusiasts. Intel, Red 
Hat, Samsung, IBM, all have large, full-time teams working on the Linux 
kernel.

Solaris was also written by an extremely large team, reflecting diverse 
interests inside Sun.   Perhaps obviously, Sun Microelectronics, 
SunSoft, and the compilers team all had slightly different needs from 
the "Solaris" project.

There's no "magic bullet."  Large teams are hard to organize.  Interests 
never align perfectly.

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 11:00:42 -0500 (EST)
From: adh at an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker)
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.
Message-ID: <201612171600.uBHG0gWN004249 at tiamat.an.bradford.ma.us>

now that my memory is prodded, i have a little sunos kernel tuner shell
script i wrote according to an old sun performance overview article.
sunos came out when memory was expensive and most machines had what
we'd consider really tiny amounts of ram; only really bulky machines
like db servers et al had anything like what we'd consider normal now.
the sunos kernel was optimized for memory in the single-digits of MB.
the script calculates and resets several variables in either kmem,
vmunix, or both.  it can be run on a running machine.  i don't know if
you'll get a perceptible, or even measurable, speedup.

i also have a ksh function which assists in calculating disk partition
tables for the cylinder-boundary metaphor, still needed as late as s8
but really obsolete in the zbr era.  have late-model solarii given up 
on it yet?

anyone interested in them?
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler         is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought

------------------------------

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