Ah yes, the lovely open source ethos: "Blame the User". You'll see this all the time. User describes what he or she wants something to do. If that something is difficult with current open source offerings, then the user is told he or she is stupid for wanting it. This is as inevitable as the sun rising. It has nothing to do with the merits of the actual idea; if you want something that is difficult with open source, then obviously you MUST be stupid, as open source products are perfect.
In any given problem space, the abuse doesn't go away until the open source solutions DO solve a given problem, and then all of a sudden the exact same people will realize that, hey, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea after all. The idea of requiring a multi-Ghz machine to -serve music- is pretty startling, IMO. I've run servers that held all the daily work for about seventy-five programmers and another twenty or twenty-five support staff that that didn't break 500mhz. Somehow, they managed to serve their files just fine to dozens of people at once. Yet, for some reason, this software requires multi-ghz to do a good job of handling ONE AUDIO STREAM. Yes, I understand why that is; it's in Perl and runs on Mysql and can run a bunch of clients at once. But someone who shows up and points out that a nice, consumer-friendly device shouldn't require a Cray XMP in the back room is -not being stupid-. He or she is correct that this is a suboptimal solution for many people. Explaining WHY it's done that way, instead of abusing him or her, would seem far more intelligent. Shipping software that works out of the box would also be helpful; release versions of Slimserver are a freaking nightmare. Nightly builds are much better, but major bugfixes to the 'stable' code don't get pushed out fast enough. To this dev team, "stable" means the code isn't changing, *not that it works*. This causes confusion and distress among users, who tend to assume that if you call something stable, they can trust that it will do what it's advertised to do. It's especially frustrating because the nightly builds are so GOOD, but the releases always suck so bad. I don't know what it is, but it's like there's a snaggletooth fairy that waves her crooked wand over the code base the night before any given major release. There was one release awhile ago -- 6.3 maybe? -- that couldn't POSSIBLY work out of the box; someone had changed some paths at the last minute and broke the server completely. The 'stable' code on the website was completely nonfunctional, but it didn't change for over two weeks, close to three IIRC. For that period, anyone downloading that software wouldn't have a working Squeezebox. That's a customer service -disaster-, but I'm not sure anyone learned anything from it. I even tried to volunteer to help test before releases went out... just to go through the installation process to be sure it worked. The replies were so assholish that I gave up on the idea. The Open Source ethos at work again, I guess. -- Malor ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Malor's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1961 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35492 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
