Re: [RFC] Measuring skills of a Debian Developer
Dear Manoj,
I'll respond to your mail now, but will not post further on this end of
the thread
because I think it's gone off-topic. You do not hold any kind of
authority over other
people or people's ideas so I decline your attempts at judging me. I've been
kind in my reply, and I expect you to show the same respect I'm showing
to you.
Please do not continue this off-topic and inflammatory discussion.
Even then, I'll try to reply to the relevant portions of your mail as if
they were
not inflammatory. Thanks for your understanding.
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
[On bts, wnpp]
You get a gold star. Yes, that was the reason we decided to
make it the standard practice in Debian.
That's what I'm talking about, yes. I'm implying that similar practice
may be as useful, or even more
[some inflammatory material here and there snipped]
Peer review papers (and I have had a few of these, and my seen
my spouse go through a tenure process), are about having peers
review, and possibly replicate, results your work; the communication
protocol (which is where the internet comes in); plays a very minor
role.
That's wrong, Manoj. Peer review is not only conducted via specific peer
review
papers or survey papers. That's only one aspect of it. The real scientific
peer review is more than that, it's a quite complicated sociological
phenomenon,
and if you've read history of science and philosophy of science (which I
believe
you have) you will agree about this after giving it some thought.
So, in words of few syllables: what does the network have to
do with the peer review process,
A lot. The question is rather: can digital communication be a good medium
for the conduct of science? Can Lederberg's dreams come true, if so how?
and what the heck does it have to do with a ranking system?
A lot. Peer review is about evaluating the quality of others' work. So...
{You may fill in the blanks]
interconnected interoperability means no central authority?
man, you need a better technical dictionary. I am working on a DARPA
project to achieve "interconnected interoperability", and you better
believe the navy has central authority in the distributed network
(indeed, we have whole classes of distributed resource managers at
work).
Sorry, your project goals may be dead wrong then! They might be using
the term in a slightly different context, though. Perhaps they've been using
the ancient sense of the same term.
distributerd systems are
orthogonal to decentralized systems; we can have distrivuted
decentralized systems, or distributed systems with a strong central
authority.
That's wrong. I don't know what you're studying but I study CS, and any
recent distributed systems textbook will tell you that distributed systems
should not have strong central authority. The so called distributed systems
are really not distributed if they have some kind of a "server" or central
management.
For an example of a client/server system that is not distributed, I'll give
you Tanenbaum's great example: the French minitel.
Heh. Folks, lets close shop and go home; Debian,
Linux. freebsd, and the whole GNU project are hereby declared closed
systems.
Well, debian was pretty closed until nm queue re-opened. Open source
doesn't always imply an open system. The open system that GNU project
used was the Internet. And by the way, I do think that GNU project is
more open
than debian.
Eray> People shouldn't have to follow this list in order to know
Eray> what's going on.
So status updates on the web pages, the announcelists, they
are also inefficient at communicating the status of debian, but a
database of skillz is not?
No, status updates are efficient. They convey the right amount of
information
which has a very high quality. The information system I refer to could
be made
as efficient.
Eray> That way "outsiders" can have a look at what's been done. As a
Eray> verification, consider the news on debian's home page.
A database of skillz can givce people more detail than mailing
list archives?
No!! Less detail. The right amount of detail. For instance they may not want
to hear people flaming...
Eray> More than that. It should be a system with plausible
Eray> interfaces, but more than a database. There must be programs
Eray> that process the data.
Plausible interfaces?
plausible
adj 1: apparently reasonable and valid [ant: {implausible}]
I see. But of course, systems with invalid and implausible
interfaces are silly. Do you really know what that word means?
Please don't judge other people's literary skills. It's a proper use. I'm
not evaluating your spelling errors, please don't judge how I use the
word plausible. Yes, I know what it means, and I used it to say what I
meant. There *are* unfortunately implausible interfaces, you can find
a million examples to that on the WWW or in many programs with
graphical UIs in Debian. Please.
So, a write only databse is funny. I see.
databases are usually funny.
Eray> Don't take it personally. Anyone who made such an _immature_
Eray> remark would receive the same reaction.
This is indeed proceless.
Don't take it personally. It's not personal.
Please, do continue: we need something to set off the
messiness in debian-vote at teh moment.
What is this supposed to mean? Either this is
* some sort of a threat
Noone here should threat one another. This would be extremely primitive
and counter-productive. I treat you with respect; talk back with
respect.
* request for help about debian-vote
I don't know much about debian-vote. Sorry.
* or a strange kind of humor which is not relevant to the discussion
I'm not interested in jokes after this many flames of yours... Sorry.
Regards,
__
Eray Ozkural
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