more lockup laptop problems with dapper

Eric S. Johansson esj at harvee.org
Thu Aug 31 04:02:54 UTC 2006


Brian McKee wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 August 2006 04:57, Wenzhuo Zhang wrote:
>>> radeon locks up after a couple of hours.  vesa reduces resolution of the
>>> screen.  Doesn't seem to be able to display the full 1400 x 1040.
>>> You now, one would think that for something so important as the video
>>> driver, there would be a fund-raising effort to pay the developers to do
>>> the damn job right.  Volunteer work is fine for noncritical stuff like
>>> open office or gimp.  but something like device drivers, we really need
>>> some mechanism to pay people to do the job right and then hold them
>>> accountable to those who paid.
> 
> Right - important stuff like the kernel maybe?
> And accountable quality like Microsoft?
> Me thinks you need to review the free software principles a bit...

you got the wrong side of the Snark.  I've been living open source since 
I wrote Kermit for the 200X at computervision and forth for the same 
machine.

Quality is not necessarily a function of who does it and how they do it. 
  I suggest you look at Watts Humphrey's work at Carnegie Mellon on 
personal and team software productivity.  The guy does amazing work at 
improving software quality in a predictable and repeatable way.  cat if 
you learn from him, your daily job would be a 9-to-5, a low panic 
effort.  The hardest part of your work would be convincing your manager 
to leave you alone.  All these improvements in the software development 
process explains why he's mostly ignored.

Microsoft suffers the same lack of accountability as the open source 
projects do.  There is no way to close the loop and inflict the 
appropriate feedback on Microsoft.  This is a fundamental problem with 
all commercial software development efforts.

With open source systems, the only time you get feedback is when the 
project is popular enough to be noticed.  I've encountered an awful lot 
of dead projects that are really really nice ideas but nobody noticed 
and as a result, the developer fatigued and walked away.  Good project, 
poor feedback mechanism.  Many times the worst failing of the project is 
a lack of PR by the developer.

on the other hand, you have projects like Samba which get lots of notice 
but nobody tells them that the user interface is designed to fail if 
touched by anyone with less than expert level knowledge.

So be careful.  there are problems in both communities.  Neither one wins.





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