Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Fbdev Bitkeeper repository

[Jan Harkes]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 08:37:21PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> and will get burned by it again.  Noone is immune.  And all of this is
> to save some disk space?  Disk drives are about $1/GB on pricewatch.
> A kernel tree, compressed, takes less than .1GB.  So you saved yourself
> 10 whole cents.  Wheeeeeee!

Could you just stop throwing around useless arguments.

Where is that $1/GB drive that can replace the 800MB drive in my Compaq
1120 laptop? There isn't any, because Compaq locked the drive geometry
in the bios to only work with this one particular 800MB drive that isn't
produced anymore. And that drive, even if I find another one, is
definitely not going to be 80 cents.

> Suppose you are a paid developer.  Around here, a kernel hack gets about
> $100K/year, and actually costs a company about $180K/year.  OK, let's say
> you live someplace really cheap so it is 1/4th that.  So that's $22.5
> an hour.  Or 37.5 cents a minute.  So if you waste 20 seconds because
> you saved yourself 100MB of space, you blew it.  It doesn't make sense.

Actually, driving out to the store to get a bigger drive, making a backup
of the old drive, opening the machine and putting the new drive in, then
restoring the backup from tape. I'd say that would take an afternoon, if
the streamer is fast enough. I'd rather spend a couple of seconds
avoiding the amount of bloat.

Another thing, here in the US people are pretty used to having a flat
rate for dialup, but what about people that have to pay by the minute
for their 5KB/s dialup connection. Saving 100MB in data transfer will
not just save them 5 hours and 41 minutes of download time, but also
a whole lot in phone charges.

> A sane person might conclude you have some other agenda.

The number of suspected conspiracies (even on lkml) seems to be on the
rise lately. Maybe it's an aftereffect of september 11th?

Linus isn't accepting my patches, it must be a conspiracy.
CML2 isn't being merged in to the tree, it must be a conspiracy.
Hostile takeover of the IDE subsystem, it must be a conspiracy.
Someone doesn't think BK solves everything, it must be a conspiracy.

Jan