2004-01-04 #1

2003 Commentary

And so this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun

• Sun designers: why is it that every rack/rail kit you design looks like it was designed by engineers who hate techs? The V60x rails are evil.
• Sun designers: why is it that if you have two ethernet adaptors, one labelled 1 and one labelled 2, that linux recognizes the one labelled 2 as eth0? And is it intentional that your LOM chip has a broken DHCP implementation?
• Opterons: why, oh why do we need them so soon? Try again in six months after the problems with the mainboards are fixed, the operating software for them has been released, and you can buy some tools which run on them! Otherwise you are wasting your money.
• Snipsnap 0.5a is further away from being usefull than was 0.3.3a. The difference? 0.5a has a whole whack of exciting new features, incompletly implemented and misleadingly undocumented, which break a whole bunch of existing, working features which were present in 0.3.3a. And as if that wasn't enough, get this: several useful features from 0.3.3a are completely absent from 0.5a. Look guys, if the answer is the product isn't ready or the product is not really usable then tell us that. I would be far happier using 0.3.3a instead of wasting my time on a release which promises new features but fails to deliver and simultaneously fails to provide the same usability that the previous release did.