I agree!
> But I think I agree with you that he seemed to suggest, a bit too
> strongly, that all OS problems were solved and that we'd never need
> another OS. It's just a matter of degree: do *you* want to write a new
> OS any time soon? How about a new compiler?
I say we leave that to the Systems&Theory professors' grad students!
> > 3) The N^2 bit was worked a bit too hard. Handwavy. How is a
> > "control" hierarchy N^2 in complexity? It would seem that any
> > hierarchy is logarithmic in complexity by nature... the proper model
> > is a tree.
>
> What's logarithmic here, though? I think you're falling pray to the old
> "everything about a tree is logarithmic" fallacy. In this case, the
> *height* of the tree is irrelevant; you're suggesting that a hierarchy
> actually involves linear communication costs, I think.
Sorry. I fell prey to my intuitions here. Youre right....
the number of edges is O(N).
> Fair enough, but as Brian points out, companies don't generally work as
> perfect hierarchies. I think Raymond's just discussing a general trend:
> in actuality, companies generally don't work like this, and open-source
> software development does. It's a proof by example that systems better
> than the classic Brooks-ian software engineering model actually *works*
> and *exists*. Companies could adopt it (internally) too even without
> completely going open-source.
I wasnt debating the point to cast dispersion on the open source
model of development. I was debating the point in reference to
anthropology and social organization.... I thought a lot of the
political/anthropological reasoning being used was weak.
-C
> Shawn
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Christopher Cantor Room 502, Dept. of Computer Science Yale University, P.O. Box 208285 New Haven, CT 06520-8285 email: cantor-christopher@cs.yale.edu phone: 203/432-0677 fax: 203/432-0593 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++