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From TFA: > When people complain to me about the lack of Nvidia support in Sway, I get really pissed off. It is not my fucking problem to support Nvidia, it’s

From TFA: > When people complain to me about the lack of Nvidia support in Sway, I get really pissed off. It is not my fucking problem to support Nvidia, it’s Nvidia’s fucking problem to support me. Even Broadcom, fucking Broadcom, supports the appropriate kernel APIs. And proprietary driver users have the gall to reward Nvidia for their behavior by giving them hundreds of dollars for their GPUs, then come to me and ask me to deal with their bullshit for free. Well, fuck you, too. Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase. Choose hardware that supports your software, not the other way around. Now, contrast with [1]: > I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Author here. You know Microsoft engineers were paid 6 figure salaries to work on that, right? I have a Patreon where I make enough money to recoup half of the costs of maintaining these projects.
- yongjik 9y ago
  "I'm doing it as volunteer" is not an excuse for being unprofessional.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    It is an excellent excuse for not devoting a huge amount of time and effort to fixing other people's stuff, though.
  - platinumrad 9y ago
    Wasn't aware that disassembling other people's broken code in your own free time for their benefit was a key part of being """professional""".
    - chongli 9y ago
      It isn't, but being a professional does suggest a basic level of respectfulness and composure. Going on a profanity-laden rant against a popular vendor and its users would seem to fall short of that. On the other hand, a polite refusal to support EGLStreams may not have moved the needle enough to reach the front page of HN.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        You know, I'm tired of being respectful and composed while others are walking all over me. If Nvidia doesn't care enough about the OS I bought their card for, fuck them, they suck, and I'm not buying another one of their cards again. I'm tired of being polite and not rocking the boat while I'm being taken advantage of.
        tomjakubowski 9y ago
        It's one thing to be a jerk to Nvidia, which seems justifiable. It's another thing to be a jerk to Nvidia users who may simply be unaware of the harm their GPU vendor has done.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        Is he being a jerk because he doesn't want to do a bunch of unpaid work? If your car manufacturer doesn't want to fix your broken car, am I a jerk for not doing it for them?
        chongli 9y ago
        No, but you are a jerk if you tell people who want to use your software to "fuck off" or buy a different car.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    Not being paid for something is pretty much the literal definition of not being a professional.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      So you define volunteers as unprofessional by definition. That doens't sound right.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Avshalom 9y ago
        It is an off handed snark based on the not terribly subtle difference between "not a professional" and "unprofessional" which I feel perfectly validated making because Sway isn't a volunteer effort, it is an (un|insufficiently) paid effort, which is also not a very subtle difference.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I would expect professionalism from someone I'm paying. I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff. If someone offers to paint your fence for free, and your fence has some really nasty angles at some point, would you say the volunteer was unprofessional if they said "yeah I'm not going to paint that part"?
    - esaym 9y ago
      There is a certain level of just being a decent human being though. If I am an unpaid pastor of a church, should I give crappy sermons?
      - icebraining 9y ago
        In what way is Sir_Cmpwn's work "crappy"? Guess what: if you ask your local Catholic priest to give sermons for your weird sect, he'll probably refuse too. And if lots of people keep insisting, it's not surprising he gets annoyed.
    - yongjik 9y ago
      > I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff. Ironically, that's exactly what Microsoft has been saying about Linux during those bad old days. Linux was successful because its developers didn't say "If you want to talk to a professional, buy something else." I'm not saying an OSS developer should bend over and take abuse from users. But I believe there's a line between that and calling users "entitled brats" just because they use vendor-supplied drivers for their $500 cards.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        No, he's calling his users "entitled brats" because they come into his channel and bitch and whine and demand he support them... for free.
        sgift 9y ago
        After the post and all his comments here I have my doubts that "bitch and whine" isn't actually "people ask me questions, I realize that they use Nvidia so their questions are by definition whining and bitching."
  - wizbright 9y ago
    SirCmpwn has a patreon. If you feel the need to help pay for him to develop a feature, you can. He can't maintain everything especially with the hardware working against him. https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn
  - ww520 9y ago
    That is some heavy BS logic.
  - Derbasti 9y ago
    By that logic, I hope you cook only professional-grade food, and exercise like a professional athlete.
mikeash 9y ago
I'd also suggest contrasting this: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii With this: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=linux https://finance.google.com/finance?q=linux
sprayk 9y ago
this pattern of a platform dev special casing in their product for specific games still goes on today, but by Nvidia and AMD. When a new, giant game comes out, nine times out of ten the developers did some depraved stuff with directx/opengl that worked on whatever few cards they actually tested on. When the game gets released (or sometimes as a prerelease), Nvidia/AMD will go through what the new game does on their hardware, find any hackey/unexpected/bad call to their drivers made by the game, fix these problems in their drivers for these specific games, and release new drivers a few days after the game releases. You could buy a $60 game on launch that is broken from the AAA developer and have to wait days to weeks on a patch from Nvidia to play with any playable framereate/graphics in general. I believe I read about this phenomenon here https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/?do=findComment&comment=5215019 https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-op...

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Author here. You know Microsoft engineers were paid 6 figure salaries to work on that, right? I have a Patreon where I make enough money to recoup half of the costs of maintaining these projects.

yongjik 9y ago
"I'm doing it as volunteer" is not an excuse for being unprofessional.
- mikeash 9y ago
  It is an excellent excuse for not devoting a huge amount of time and effort to fixing other people's stuff, though.
- platinumrad 9y ago
  Wasn't aware that disassembling other people's broken code in your own free time for their benefit was a key part of being """professional""".
  - chongli 9y ago
    It isn't, but being a professional does suggest a basic level of respectfulness and composure. Going on a profanity-laden rant against a popular vendor and its users would seem to fall short of that. On the other hand, a polite refusal to support EGLStreams may not have moved the needle enough to reach the front page of HN.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      You know, I'm tired of being respectful and composed while others are walking all over me. If Nvidia doesn't care enough about the OS I bought their card for, fuck them, they suck, and I'm not buying another one of their cards again. I'm tired of being polite and not rocking the boat while I'm being taken advantage of.
      - tomjakubowski 9y ago
        It's one thing to be a jerk to Nvidia, which seems justifiable. It's another thing to be a jerk to Nvidia users who may simply be unaware of the harm their GPU vendor has done.
        StavrosK 9y ago
        Is he being a jerk because he doesn't want to do a bunch of unpaid work? If your car manufacturer doesn't want to fix your broken car, am I a jerk for not doing it for them?
        chongli 9y ago
        No, but you are a jerk if you tell people who want to use your software to "fuck off" or buy a different car.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  Not being paid for something is pretty much the literal definition of not being a professional.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    So you define volunteers as unprofessional by definition. That doens't sound right.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Avshalom 9y ago
      It is an off handed snark based on the not terribly subtle difference between "not a professional" and "unprofessional" which I feel perfectly validated making because Sway isn't a volunteer effort, it is an (un|insufficiently) paid effort, which is also not a very subtle difference.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I would expect professionalism from someone I'm paying. I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff. If someone offers to paint your fence for free, and your fence has some really nasty angles at some point, would you say the volunteer was unprofessional if they said "yeah I'm not going to paint that part"?
  - esaym 9y ago
    There is a certain level of just being a decent human being though. If I am an unpaid pastor of a church, should I give crappy sermons?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      In what way is Sir_Cmpwn's work "crappy"? Guess what: if you ask your local Catholic priest to give sermons for your weird sect, he'll probably refuse too. And if lots of people keep insisting, it's not surprising he gets annoyed.
  - yongjik 9y ago
    > I don't expect professionalism from someone who's basically giving me free stuff. Ironically, that's exactly what Microsoft has been saying about Linux during those bad old days. Linux was successful because its developers didn't say "If you want to talk to a professional, buy something else." I'm not saying an OSS developer should bend over and take abuse from users. But I believe there's a line between that and calling users "entitled brats" just because they use vendor-supplied drivers for their $500 cards.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      No, he's calling his users "entitled brats" because they come into his channel and bitch and whine and demand he support them... for free.
      - sgift 9y ago
        After the post and all his comments here I have my doubts that "bitch and whine" isn't actually "people ask me questions, I realize that they use Nvidia so their questions are by definition whining and bitching."
- wizbright 9y ago
  SirCmpwn has a patreon. If you feel the need to help pay for him to develop a feature, you can. He can't maintain everything especially with the hardware working against him. https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn https://www.patreon.com/sircmpwn
- ww520 9y ago
  That is some heavy BS logic.
- Derbasti 9y ago
  By that logic, I hope you cook only professional-grade food, and exercise like a professional athlete.

mikeash 9y ago

I'd also suggest contrasting this: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii With this: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=linux https://finance.google.com/finance?q=linux

sprayk 9y ago

this pattern of a platform dev special casing in their product for specific games still goes on today, but by Nvidia and AMD. When a new, giant game comes out, nine times out of ten the developers did some depraved stuff with directx/opengl that worked on whatever few cards they actually tested on. When the game gets released (or sometimes as a prerelease), Nvidia/AMD will go through what the new game does on their hardware, find any hackey/unexpected/bad call to their drivers made by the game, fix these problems in their drivers for these specific games, and release new drivers a few days after the game releases. You could buy a $60 game on launch that is broken from the AAA developer and have to wait days to weeks on a patch from Nvidia to play with any playable framereate/graphics in general. I believe I read about this phenomenon here https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/?do=findComment&comment=5215019 https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-op...