RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!

[Michael K. Johnson]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 05:30:32PM -0500, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> Even if you do have people sign their specs with gpg...how do you really know
> who's key's to trust.

Oh, that was just a throwaway idea, I'm not sure if it makes sense.
Maybe could be optional as a kind of +1 on the provenance that people
can use if they want to.

> And how do you deal with conflicting reports.

Probably like reviews of products/books/etc.  Like at Amazon, a book
gets, say, 3.5 stars with 10.  So you read the comments and correlate
the clue level of the comment with the number of stars provided by the
reviewer.

The more reporters, the more you can trust the report.

> I'd imagine
> certain popular off the shelf groups of hardware will have a lot of
> reports...a lot of conflicting reports (depending on several factors of
> the user's particular experience level). can't really limit this sort of
> thing to a few trusted individuals..yer going to need a wide range of
> people with a wide range of hardware for this to be useful.

Absolutely!  That's why it's got to be EASY to get good information or
there's not much point in doing it.  I'd run it myself if it took
less than 10 minutes, and I know I'd never get around to it if it took
20.

> And, how do you make sure the hardware database takes into account
> specific hardware conflicts...not just broken hardware...but specific
> issues with specific combinations of hardware.

The entire report has to be available whenever part of it is being
presented.

Say you are searching for video card foo.  It has average rating bar.
You want to look into this more, so you click on "read all reports"
Reports that look interesting, you click on "see hardware" and you
have the entire hardware database for the machine (we probably
shouldn't include things like tag ids from dmidecode :-) and you
can see what the context is.  Some main things (say motherboard
version, running kernel version, that type of thing) can be displayed
in short form with the review.

Then, if you really want to get fancy, you add the ability to add
comments to individual reports.  You happen to know that the reason
the video card foo didn't work on that system is that there's a
conflict with bios version J.UNK on that particular motherboard.
So you post a annotation to that effect.

If you want to get really fancy, you do an advogato-like voting
structure so that consistently clueful reporters have their
ratings weighted higher in producing the averages.

> -jef"this monster is going to need a bit of care and feeding...maybe
> even some sort of /. like moderation scheme to keep hardware comments
> maintained"spaleta

Absolutely, though I'd think that advogato or a combination of /. and
advogato voting systems for different parts (/. for individual
reports, advogato for reporters?) would make sense.


Anyway, it's clearly a lot of work, and I don't want to minimize
that.

michaelkjohnson

 "He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
 Linux Application Development                     -- Ben Franklin
 http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/