Posts by Nigel 11

Journalists privileged?

The suggestion that jornalists are a privileged profession worries me. Is this the powers that be trying to weasel their way into restricting the rights of anyone not registered as a journalist to take pictures? It would be just like this government, to take away our rights under the guise of protecting the same.

The important bit is in there, but it ought to be all that needed saying. '"Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel". Amen. Long may it stay that way. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilence". Members of the public armed with cameras make that vigilence more effective (as the police have found, to their discomfort). The authorities need watching every bit as much as the terrorists.

Not nearly good enough

Unfortunately(?), it's very simple to protect a target from all such weapons. Just put it under a mountain, by driving an access tunnel in sideways, and protect it from blast through the tunnel with a series of massive steel blast doors. Half a mile of rock is nuke-proof.

The USA knows. Strategic Air Command is under a mountain in Colorado, and was believed to be proof against even the largest multi-megaton nukes in the USSR's arsenal. Fortunately for all of us this was never tested, but there are few reasons to doubt it. MAD: a few thousand men trapped half a mile underground by a few tens of meters of radioactive rubble, not really wondering why no-one is answering their phone or coming to dig them out....

@Tom 12

You've got tasting notes for paint stripper?

Try a wee dram of Lagavulin or Laphroaig. I'm not saying you'll like them, many don't, but anyone who hasn't destroyed all his taste buds drinking paint-stripper will have to agree that these are complex, multi-layered flavours. And as unlike a mass-market blended whisky, as a pint of good real ale is unlike a pint of Carling.

UIs should be stable

Imagine that software designers made cars. This year, you steer with a wheel, the clutch is on the left, the accellerator is on the right, the brakes are in the middle. (Car 6.1, since the 1960s - almost no-one living can remember versions 1 through 5. Car 6.0 was the same except you had to do double-declutching. 6.1 really WAS an improvement - a small UI change requiring much tricky re-engineering inside the gearbox, where no-one except a serious techie ever sees the details.)

Next year, they swap the brake and the accellerator. (Car 7.0)

The year after, they decide wheels and pedals are so old-fashioned, and "everyone" is used to driving computer games, so they put a game controller in the cockpit and remove the wheel and the pedals. (Car 8.0 a.k.a. "Panarama")

Of course, it couldn't happen. There would be far too many fatalities.But with software there aren't many fatalities. (I'm sure there are a few: heart attacks and the odd employee going postal, but none of those can be pinned on the software vendor for certain). So they keep screwing with the UI and annoying the hell out of us.

I happen to like Firefox precisely because the UI developments from FF2 to FF3 to FF3.5 have been incremental improvements that never annoyed me. Please keep it that way. If FF4 abandons the interface I'm used to, there will be no reason for me to stick with it and quite a lot of reason not to (i.e. you've pissed me off, so sod you). I'm aware of Opera, Seamonkey, Chrome, Safari, but am not interested in spending time leaning to use them without thinking about it. Don't give me a reason to become better-acquainted, or I will do just that.

The best UI is the one that uncounted millions of users are used to, unless it is so terrible that at least half of them are crying out for something - anything - different. A good UI fades into the background once you've learned it, just like the details of how to ride a bicycle, while the human brain gets on with processing the information in the window (i.e. on the other side of the interface). "Improvements" should be incremental - something that can be ignored until or unless one discovers the need for them. Menus are a very good way of accomplishing this, because a new item in a menu doesn't get in the way of the familiar ones. So are plug-ins, because if you don't need them, you don't plug them in.

"Fragile: Glass" - red rag to a bull?

I suspect just as the bored staff in the packing department have contests, so do the bored staff in the shipping depot. In their case, "can we break it"? I'd suggest that the value of "Fragile" stickers is negative, it just encourages them.

A long time ago I took delivery of a disk drive (back then, 80Gb was the size of a washing machine). I spotted a hole in the cardboard and noted it on the delivery note before signing "contents not inspected". Good thing I did that.

When the engineer arrived and uncrated it, it was clear all was not well. The first sign of trouble was that the "washing machine" was no longer rectangular. A little more instection revealed a rectangular hole through the cabinet. Inside, the wreckage of the controller circuit boards was rattling around. (Today, several square feet of electronics has shrunk to a couple of square inches).

Total insurance write off (back then, ££££). A fork-lift driver had impaled it, and then, for good measure, dropped it from a considerable height. I guess drastic action was needed to get it off his prong before anyone noticed. Or I suppose it might have fallen off a stack in front of him moving at speed. Either way they were happy to send it on its way to become "Someone else's problem".

Passing off

Surely typosquatting is a form of passing-off,specially if the page contains advertisements for competing products. It is using a name that is deceptively similar to that of a genuine business, and using it to the detriment of the genuine business. (It must be deceptively similar or you wouldn't have typoed it).

Cue lawsuits, I hope.

In passing: for some reason I often typo firstdiirect when trying to get to my bank, and I get to a squatted page. How/why is the double-i a common typo?

Array reliability factors

The trouble with single parity is when you are recovering, you have no parity. And it's at that time you discover thata block on one of the other disks has gone bad and can't be read. Ouch.

Data-scrubbing helps. (That means that the array reads itself in toto every night or every week, while there is still a working parity disk. If a read error happens, don't fail the disk immediately. Recalculate the block from the other disks and re-write it. For a single bad block, the drive will re-map it and that's the temporary end of the problem, with the block now stored elsewhere in the drive). You are of course also watching the SMART statistics, and if any Reallocated sector count starts increasing other than very infrequently, you pre-emptively replace that drive )

Even so, you'd prefer to have parity during a rebuild operation.

If it takes a day to rebuild and the expected time to failure of another drive in the array is 100 days, that's a 1/100 chance of losing the multi-Terabyte array with RAID-5 after the first drive fails. That 100 days is not 3+ years, because the first failure may reflect a common defect in the whole batch of disks. It may well be less than 100 days to the next, fatal, failure.

With Raid-6, two more drives have to die for it to be fatal, that's 1 in 10,000 chance . Probably good enough. Three parity disks gives you 1 in a million, even for a fairly pessimistic MTTF assumption. I think SUN has this about right.

I wonder if any RAID array supplier has ever bought disks in batches well ahead of time and kept them "hot", so that they could ship arrays to customers with no two disks from the same batch, and all with different run-times (spread over several months) at time of assembly? Supplying somewhat "used" disks would actually considerably increase reliability!

I used to build 4-5 disk Linux software RAID arrays using one disk made by each of 4-5 manufacturers to eliminate common-mode failure as far as possible. But today, there are only 4 manufacturers: Hitachi, WD, Seagate, Samsung.

As for always using Raid-1 or -10, it isn't much better UNLESS you always mirror to a drive made by a different manufacturer. If both drives are from the same batch, common mode failure, failure of first drive may imply MTTF of ther drive is 100 days. 1 day to re-mirror -> 1% chance of total loss. Ouch, again.

If you (or your vendor) has had the foresight to mirror to a different make of drive, failures should not correlate and MTTF of the surviving disk is probably 1000 days, 0.1% chance of total loss. RAID-6 is more reliable. Of course, performance isn't as good. And these are post-first-failure probabilities, some folks will never see any drive fail at all.

BTW how many folks out there are using hardware RAID controllers with non-partity RAM buffering your data? So a faulty memory chip goes undetected until all your data is scrambled?

Another win for Linux software RAID, just as long as it's running in a server with ECC RAM. Non-ECC RAM in controllers is IMO the reason why RAID-[5,6] has a bad rep.

Maybe it all becomes irrelevant soon. With the latest filesystems you will be able choose per-file or per-folder-tree what level of redundancy you want. Multiple partity with backups for the filesystem metadata. RAID-1, or -6, or -5, or none for files, depending on how important their contents are deemed to be. Also end-to-end checksumming to detect faulty controller electronics or buffer RAM. Also self-healing. So systems won't want RAID controllers at all, they'll just want a big pool of raw disks for the filesystem to manage.

Sun started this ball rolling with ZFS, a shame they seem to have dropped it of late.

An alternative?

An alternative is to purchase your own DNS name and then sign up for the free edition of Google Apps. You do the verification by making modifications to your subdomain.

This, as of about a month ago, so it might have changed since. But hopefully not. Google can validate your domain name and your domain name registrar has verified you by credit card payment.

Downside? It's a bit ... ok a lot ... more "technical" to do it this way and it takes a while longer to get mail up and running. On the plus side, if Google ever lets you down, you can point your MX record at any other e-mail provider that you wish to move to. And you get to choose your own domain name. Pretty good value for £1.50 p.a.

Tabkit

Anyone using Firefox today who wants to open lots of tabs, download the Tabkit plug-in. Instant tabs heaven (down the left-hand side rather than at the top, makes great use of a wide-screen monitor).

Maybe something like his shuld be the FF 4 default ... but there again, it's customisable, so defaults matter a lot less.

Name?

gLOBALfOUNDRIES, surely, as a mick-take.

Or, a small Chimpzilla would be a Bonobozilla, which rolls nicely off the tongue.

Dead mouse

Does this story mean that I'm not the only person ever to have been called in to fix a dead PC (a work one) to discover that the cause of the fault was a dead mouse of the meaty variety? I still can't believe that it managed to crawl in through any of the available holes in the ironmongery. Having done so it inserted its head into the fan assembly on top of an old hot AMD Opteron. I hope for the mouse's sake that this broke its neck, rather than causing it a slow agonizing death as the heatsink temperature ascended to boiling point. and beyond.

@Mike Wood - if it's certain models of Dell, give the user a standard ATX power supply. If it's the other models, give them a Dell power supply from the former sort of Dell. Tell the user that any fool can replace a power supply, you just unscrew it and unnplug it and plug in and screw in the new one. Retire to a safe distance and wait for the BANG and the smoke. Same ATX connector, different pin-outs. I quite agree, the only good Dell is a dead Dell.

I've also seen a PSU go bang, taking out not the 5A fuse in the power lead, not the 13A fuse in the distribution board, not the 30A breaker on the circuit, but the 180A fuse in the vintage fusebox feeding the breaker box. Magic! (And a day's downtime, while the electricians scoured the UK for a 180 Amp non-rewireable fuse cartridge).

@Peter Kay - cats today sleep on top of the power extension reel, that says "extend cable to full length before use" moulded on the case in flyspeck-4 font. A month later when you try to use the reel for something else you find that the cable on the reel is fused into one lump of PVC. Cats aren't stupid. They're the BOFHs of the animal kingdom. They always land on their feet.

Big nuke needed

To EMP a continent you'd need a BIG nuke - tens of megatons, and the technology to put it a very long way above the ground. To EMP at all you need the technology to detonate a nuke at least twenty miles up. Either way the missile launch would tell all who did it, and I doubt if retribution on the megatonne scale would be far behind. Nukes are MAD.

It's possible to construct an electropulse device using electricity and conventional explosives that would have an effective range measured in meters. I don't know if the range would ever exceed the blast damage radius, let alone the blast radius of a bigger lump of explosive. Maybe, using exotica like superconducting magnets ... but once again, why bother?

It's supposedly possible to take out consumer electronics with a big capacitor, a spark gap, and a resonant cavity, from the room next door. If I'm ever driven to the farthest fringes of sanity by excessive decibels from next-door every night all night for weeks, I might R&D this for myself.

And the biggest electromagnetic threat of all? That massive ongoing H-bomb we call the Sun. We don't know how big the biggest possible coronal mass ejection might be. We do know that there was one in the early days of the electrical telegraph which melted the wires, bigger than any we've seen since. The same today would take out electricity grids, planet-wide. It's not the same sort of pulse - it's a minutes-long pulse of charged particles which induces a large DC current in systems designed for AC.

Another argument for the Severn barrage?

If we built the Severn barrage it could generate about 15% of our electricity needs. That's tidal power, so there would be slack periods of zero output twice a day when the level of water on both sides of the barrage is about the same. The time at which this happens is tuneable to some extent. For example, the operators might allow a lot of incoming tide to bypass the turbines at 4am when little electricity is needed, so as to fill upstream as fast as possible, thereby storing energy for six hours later when there would be a use for it.

If there were times when surplus wind-generated electricity was available, could the barrage also be used as a massive pumped-storage system, either by running the turbines backwards, or by installing pumps as well as generator-turbines?

An argument against the barrage is the ecological effect of reducing the upstream tidal range. (NB not eliminating it and turning the estuary into a lake, it's a barrage, not a dam!) If it could be operated to store surplus windpower, it should be possible to maintain most of the current tidal range, though not its daily regularity. Would this be better on the environmental front?

Something does have to be done to switch to renewable energy. Otherwise within a few human generations, most of the planet will become uninhabitable by large mammals such as humans (submerged, or too hot and humid). Myself, I do think that we ought to ensure that humanity has the possibility of a long-term future, and therefore we *have* to cut down on the burning of fossil fuel.

Or are we all lemmings at heart?

Don't panic!

I would expect people reading this to be numerate.

Death rate in healthy people from swine flu is clearly under one in 10,000, from the news to date. Maybe a lot under, if there are many people who catch it, go to bed, don't call a doc, get better, goes unreported. The risk of dying per annum from any other cause is 6 in 10,000 for M age 20 and 30 in 10,000 for M age 50. Risk of sudden heart attack death is 3 in 10,000 for M 50.

So this flu should not be high on our worry list, unless you have an underlying health problem that greatly increases your personal risk.

It is VERY infectious, so worst case is one in three of us catching it before the vaccine is universally available, and (sadly) up to 2000 deaths out of 20M cases (60M population). Plus a larger number of deaths amongst the at-risk groups.

If it mutates into something deadlier ... that's the really scary possibility, but no point worrying until it does. Hopefully we'll get a vaccine for the current strain first and it'll give some immunity against related strains.

More interestingly, there's Darwinian competition between any deadly mutant and the current mild strain if the same antibodies work against both. The mild one should win - many people stay on their feet, spreading it around, rather than collapsing and being carted off to a hospital or other isolation facility. A successful parasite is the one that does NOT often kill its host.

If the human race ever runs up against a true 50%+ killer pandemic, the medical action of last resort might be to deliberately create a less deadly strain and to artificially spread that around to out-compete the deadly one. If you want to start a conspiracy theory that this has already happened, go right ahead. (Something less dramatic might indeed have happened naturally - the initial flu outbreak in Mexico looked far worse than the subsequent pandemic strain. But that might also have been massive under-reporting of non-fatal flu because impoverished Mexican peasants can hardly afford to consult a doctor).

HD Manufacturers aren't lost.

Price of an SSD scales linearly with capacity. Price of an HD doesn't. It'll be quite a while before one can get a Terabyte of solid-state storage for the cost of an HD.

And I'm not optimistic that Moores law will last very much longer. You can't make smaller atoms. For that reason I don't anticipate Terabyte chips, ever.

BTW the best solid-state storage performance would not attach to a disk interface, it would be a card that plugs in to a PCI-X slot.. That's also a more natural manufacturing format for a big bunch of chips. And if HD manufacturers get optical write addressing working, the physical limits are hundreds of Terabytes per disk. (What would one do with a hundred Terabytes inside one's PC?)

My guess is that a future PC will have maybe 40-80Gb of solid-state storage soldered onto the motherboard and a hard disk as an option when the user needs larger amounts of local storage. A smart way to use the solid-state storage would be as persistent cache for a network filesystem. The problem with diskless workstations has always been that they forget everything when they are powered down and then thrash the network and the server when they power up.

It's what they do not what they say

So ban all MPs from all schools forthwith. They've excluded themselves from the vetting process, so they must have something to hide. They tell us often enough, "you have nothing to be afraid of if you don't have something to hide", don't they?

So ban reptiles, sorry, MPs, from schools. No reason to wait until the vetting procedures become effective. Ban them now to make the point. We don't even need any new legislation. We just need school staff to tell them to <go away>.

Life imitating art?

Anyone see that episode of CSI Miami two or three weeks ago?

Who watches the watchmen?

Who watches the watchmen?

Are all the staff with write-access to this database vetted (to a much more stringent level than the school volunteers)? If not, it raises the possibility that a paedophile might be able to add himself or a likeminded pervert to the list of people who have been vetted. Which possibility alone makes this database worse than useless.

Then there's the possibility of maliciously labelling someone as a paedophile, or the possibility that you have a pervert as a namesake.

I'm with Philip Pullman on this one - it's a dagger through the heart of civil society, and more of a danger to our children than a safeguard.

Wrong.

"If rapamycin - or drugs like rapamycin - works as envisioned, the potential reduction in overall health cost for the US and the world will be enormous."

Not unless it causes an extension of healthy life followed by a rapid terminal decline.

If, as seems more likely, it slows down the ageing process, then it means that more people will develop one of the degenerative diseases of old age and then they'll stay alive with it for longer. So it will be robbing Peter to pay Paul -- making a short-term saving to health budgets but pushing a greater cost out a decade or two in time.

How long ...

For how long does a folly have to remain useless, before it can acquire a use and still remain a folly?

Paris knows a lot about folly ....

@original ash - bravo!

Perfect. I was going to post the same.

A lesson from history

Ask a German jew about ID cards. You might, of course, have trouble finding one today.

In 1871, the German state came into existence. It was a modern, forward-looking, liberal state, that most of the inhabitants of the former German confederation looked forwards to becoming members of. And so they queued up to obtain their membership cards and new passports. The state didn't ask for a lot by modern standards. The obvious things that "everyone" knew. Name, Address, Date of birth, Religion ....

Scroll forwards 70 years, and these people's children and grandchildren who had not even been born at the time were being rounded up for a one-way trip to an extermination camp. A major reason so few German jews survived, was that the German state had all the records it needed to find them.

ID cards and the database of evil are at present as undead as vampires, and much less desirable. I will be voting Tory at the next election, and not even bothering to consider any other issue, because this is the last chance we have to preserve some vestige of liberty. If ID cards and the database behind them are not scrapped, shredded and buried in concrete, it is only a matter of time before we, who failed to learn the lesson of history, come to re-live it.

I no longer hope just to see the Labour party defeated. I hope to see it wiped off the political map forever, for it to join the Whigs in the history book. Anything less, and the state control freaks will soon be back, blindly (and possibly even with good intentions) building the road to hell.

American cars better?!

Even 'merkans have worked out that they are not, which is why GM has gone bust, Chrysler is in dire straits, and Ford are busily importing the rather better automotive know-how that they developed for non-US markets. In the meantime Toyota, Honda and Volkswagen are eating just about everyone else's lunch.

Of course it's their own fault, for thinking that gas would remain under a dollar a gallon for ever, and having the sort of taste that led them to choose demilitarized APCs (Hummers and two-ton look-alikes), and cut-down goods vehicles (Station Wagons) over anything sane, like perhaps starting with a VW Passat and making it a foot wider for the benefit of wider people inside and wider roads outside.

BTW Automatic transmission can actually save fuel, if it's a modern computer-controlled real gearbox rather than a 1950s technology torque converter thing.

It matches my rule of thumb ...

... which says that more bog-standard memory trumps less but faster memory every time.

Slightly surprised that 3-channel offers no noticeable advantage. Perhaps it's time will come with future iterations and speed steps of Intel's new architecture. Anyway, there's a financial advantage: 12Gb without needing to buy expensive 4Gb DIMMS.

PAE and multicore CPUs means that 8Gb or even 12Gb may be sensible with 32-bit Linux: 2Gb or 3Gb per process, each running flat out in its own core. But if you aren't constrained by some sort of historical relic, 64-bit Linux should be today's default. I doubt I'll be doing many new 32-bit installs in the future.

The format problem

Getting data off a tape is not purely an electronics problem. There are mechanical issues. Videotape recorders use rotating heads, and is an appropriate head / tape transport assembly still in existence? I'm fairly sure that anything done to a one-D signal with 1969 electronics could be re-done today at small cost (given the right specs), but re-engineering the hardware could be a much bigger problem.

Lets hope that whatever vintage hardware they can find in a museum or "graveyard" can be coaxed back to life.

@AC "No IE"

What you see, is Microsoft being obstructive, and continuing to abuse their monopoly. The EU has not "stuffed it up". It's Microsoft that's stuffing us right royally.

What they *should* do in the spirit of the EC ruling, and what the EU court might yet force them to do, is to ship it with a simple download tool, that starts with a page saying "download your choice(s) of free internet browser(s) by clicking below" and a set of links, of equal size, to MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others(?)

What vendors will do, I hope, for those who are still stuck on a modem, is include a software CD containing all the common browsers pre-downloaded (except MSIE which you *have* to get through Windows Update because Microsoft don't offer it as a download.exe). Also OpenOffice and other common freeware.

Now someone's going to tell me that MS has agreements with all the majpr vendors that prevent them from bundling such an optional software CD containing products that compete with MS ones? Back to that EU court for round three!

@Bill Fresher

Are you sure that's a joke? I was wondering whether it might be a mobile egg and stay-at-home sperm in an unusual biogical role reversal. For real.

Have they worked out yet what is the biological advantage of male / female bimorphism?There are only a few species in which all are hermaphrodite and capable of reproducing sexually with any other member of their species. I would have thought that was an evolutionary advantage, but obviously it can't be.

Scrap ID Cards NOW!!

We don't want every detail of our lives stored in some central database, for identity thieves to plunder, and for a future repressive government to use to enslave us. We don't want to be subjected to draconian fines whenever we fail to tell the government that we have changed our address, or our bank account, or our lover.

We don't want to pay £50 or £100 or £200 for the "privilege" of having a card, without which we can't get a passport, without which we can't leave the UK. Plus ££(£) more to travel to a government office where we'll be finger-printed, retina-scanned, photographed, and ritually humiliated ("interviewed") . Note that this as-yet-undecided fee is one reason for the uncertainty over whether it'll cost six billion or twenty. £200 times 60M is £12bn.

We all know that services are going to have to be cut, and taxes raised, to balance the country's books. Start the cutting here - a scheme of absolutely no benefit to anyone except for a closet Nazi like the un-lamented jackboot Jacqui. It's one bit of public expenditure which I'm quite sure no-one will miss.

Take note. Unless Labour does the biggest about turn of all time, I will be voting Tory, without even considering any other issue. This assault on our liberty is far more important than anything else, and must be scrapped before the data is gathered. Later would be too late.

Where's the mushroom-cloud icon? That little flame isn't nearly hot enough.

Spin Alert!

Quote Buffalo:

"Absolutely not, we use software RAID controllers to constantly synchronise and monitor the array when RAID 5 is enabled.

"When configuring RAID 5, either on a server or a dedicated NAS product there is a lengthy synchronisation check that takes place to make sure everything is working correctly, you can even schedule this check to happen on our product every week if you so wish."

What does that actually mean? That they don't use ECC, but that you can check for inconsistent checksums a week after the corruption is irreversible? That's worthy of "Yes, minister"!

Or perhaps what they mean is, they use a hardware RAID controller, so that a RAM error in the memory attached to the network-facing CPU can't affect RAID-5 XOR calculations, but can only corrupt the data sent to and fro on the network without any sign of trouble. That's supposed to be better?

My question stands. Do they use ECC RAM -- for the network-facing CPU and even more critically, for the RAM built in to the RAID controller. No ECC, no warning that what was written into the RAM is not what came out, so one can suffer creeping corruption without any explicit hardware errors.

My own opinion of hardware RAID controllers is very jaundiced. I've had nothing but grief over the years from various Adaptec and 3Ware 4 or 8 disk offerings. Of course, past experience may not generalize to current products. Another nasty FAIL with such beasts -- if (when!) the controller dies, you may find that it is impossible to reconstruct the array by connecting the disks to a new controller (new model because the one you have is obsolete, or even same obsolete model with a new firmware revision). In contrast, with up-to-date Linux software RAID, you just attach the disks to a new motherboard and everything auto-assembles and works. Combine this with the advanced mdraid features like resizing and reshaping, and I'll go for Linux-based software RAID every time.

And don't get me started on fake RAID controllers - pathetic one-function chips that calculate XORs at a small fraction of the speed of the cheapest Athlon you can buy! They might have been a good idea when state-of-the-art was a 100MHz i486. They're snake oil today.

(Enterprise-class hardware RAID and NAS is a different kettle of fish - I'm flaming about NAS boxes that cost a couple of grand tops here.)

Software update heaven

"As usual, the update will be pushed directly to Firefox users and requires only a simple restart of the browser to be installed".

And this browser remembers all the web pages you were browsing and re-opens them after you restart it. If you want it to, that is.

"If only all software updates were that easy"

Amen.

PS Free plug ... If you thought Firefox was one step away from perfection because the tabs were along the top rather than down the side ... get the Tab Kit plug-in.

The ultimate riposte

The ultimate riposte to the negative aspects of this argument is open-source software development and the tools and social structures that support it. Linux does not have and does not need a corporation and all its parasitic management types sucking on it. (That's the kernel, desktops, webserver, compilers, languages, various other large apps ... not just the kernel).

That said, engineers in general probably do gain from certain personality traits in moderation, which at the extreme lead to Asberger's and autism. Attention to detail, the ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, a desire to achieve perfection (though recognising that it's impossible), and intolerance of irrelevant or damaging demands made by the morons that call themselves managers and marketing.

To the parasites, why not just f**k off and create your own perfectly socialized software teams and leave us alone? Oh, you can't write code that works. You can't write code at all. You'd rather pay Microsoft whatever they demand for a heap of crap that's broken by design. What a shame. F**k off and die, then!