This sucks.

[callahan]

Checking up and came across this mess: http://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2082-post-13742.html#pid13742

I'm not a dev. I have no opinions about the philosophical divide that led to the community split a while ago. I frequent both forums and try to contribute where I can. I see value, and imperfections, in both groups.

This trolling sucks. It's unnecessary and hurts the community. Please don't do that.

 

[Northsky]

Hello callahan and thank you for your message,

First and foremost, we do not encourage people to troll the other forum. It is not in the spirit of this place and the rules we live by. We would advocate people to calm down and not respond to provocations by Raion and be excellent to each other.

Personally, this is the first time I see this thread and to me it is not surprising to see such a thing unfold over there. Raion has over the past years angered quite many people with the way he does things. He did arbitrarily ban me and Onre, for instance, from the aforementioned forums after he learned that we had been working on getting GCC 8.2.0 to run on IRIX again and posted false slander about us there. This was way before SGUG was founded. Instead of being provoked by this, we just continued our work and focused on what makes this hobby fun. With the limited time I personally have to devote to this hobby, I would rather focus on the fun aspects of it and encourage others to do the same. Negativity breeds negativity.

It does pain me to see false and misleading information being spread on the other forums about technical side of things, but as previously said, better to just ignore them and carry on.

We are living interesting times with new things being ported and work being done on documenting PSUs and devising replacement parts where needed. Let's keep the good spirits up.

 

[Unxmaal]

@callahan I'm curious as to why you think Raion gets a pass for spreading disinformation and outright lies?

Speaking truth to power is not trolling.

Let's go through the points in the opening post:

• Raion claims MIPSPro has the "best code generation for all machines". This is demonstrably, provably false.
  • Mburton points out Raion hates GNU and GCC. This is true, with listed evidence
• Raion claims Compilertron is hacked together. This is partially true, and I detailed later where it is not true.
  • Mburton points out Raion bungled a sudo patch, that was subsequently retracted. Again true.
• Raion claims the SGUG GCC builds don't offer any performance improvement over MIPSPro. This is laughably false and easy for anyone to test.
  • Mburton implies Raion doesn't understand compilers and doesn't understand the details of the changes made to GCC well enough to make any claims about it. This is provably true, as Raion is not a developer and has never had professional work experience in any development capacity, whereas the developers working on the SGUG GCC are all professional developers with years of experience writing C and C++.
• Raion claims Nekoware II is under development. This cannot be proved as nothing has been published.
  • Mburton points out nothing has been published.
• Raion invites people to use gitea over Github, stating Github is a "corporate bigwig".
  • Mburton points out this as an example of Raion furthering his ideologies.

Mburton closes with

• stating Raion has trashed a year's worth of other people's hard work
  • which is verifiably true; see IN forums archives
• stating Raion has created no tangible output
  • which is also true; he has created no published code or proofs of concept
• suggests Raion get more experience before making unfounded statements without technical merit

Per Wikipedia:

"In internet slang, a troll is a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the Internet to distract by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion, whether for the troll's amusement or a specific gain. "

Mburton's remarks were not extraneous, off-topic, or digressive. They were in direct response to statements already made by Raion. If Raion was "inflamed" by statements of fact that disprove his statements, that does not mean that the statements were false, and it does not imply the statements were trolling.

It's most interesting to me that when someone writes verifiable, scientifically-provable truths that run counter to Raion's wild, unfounded claims, it is characterized as "trolling".

In truth, if a person posts something on Raion's forum that Raion disagrees with, factual or not, it either gets deleted or Raion counters it with FUD. If the poster continues dissent, Raion will delete the post or will lock the thread.

Dissenting opinions are not allowed on IN, as dissent leads to analysis, and analysis leads to disproving the dozens of myths and lies that Raion has spread about IRIX and SGI for years. Irixnet is not a place for open discussion of technical efforts. It's a place of worship, for faith-based engineering in the absence of truth.

@callahan how does it make you feel when you see neophyte SGI hobbyists avoid SGI Fuels because "they have overheating issues"?

How about when they struggle to port modern code to MIPSPro because they mistakenly believe that GCC can't "align the memory stacks"?

Or when their threads are met with derision, or are locked or deleted because they dared to ask the wrong question?

It sickens me when I see some of the few people in the world that have an interest in this fascinating hardware and OS get misled, or worse, turned away, due to the actions of a petty little tin-pot dictator.

 

[massiverobot]

Checking up and came across this mess: http://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2082-post-13742.html#pid13742

I'm not a dev. I have no opinions about the philosophical divide that led to the community split a while ago. I frequent both forums and try to contribute where I can. I see value, and imperfections, in both groups.

This trolling sucks. It's unnecessary and hurts the community. Please don't do that.

Yes, I was also angered when I read Raion's troll of the work over here. I was here when compiling GCC was not even a thing yet, cross-compiliation was a big deal that got the project over a big hump and Compilertron was a key part in making that available to the people trying to make GCC happen- so that then a working dev env could be created for modern packages...

In my mind, Compilerton alone is more than Irix net has accomplished or released! I don't recall anything they have allowed other interested devs to see or to freely contribute to. Calling Compilterton a hack-job was a nasty troll and he was inviting a response.

If we all want to get along we need the leaders to lead and not back-stab- then we'll grow as a community.

 

[callahan]

My post was not about the merits of any argument in favor of this site our against other folks' opinions. There are many good arguments. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think you all were doing great work and value the perspectives here.

The posts I saw were trolls. We have our own site founded because of the differences outlined in this thread. Going into someone else's house and peeing in their virtual cheerios isn't going to change their mind, nor will it make the community see this site as the more open/accepting SGI user/dev forum.

I get the anger. I get the complaints. If there is a need to reply over there to substantially correct the record, a less confrontational approach would serve everyone better. It may not feel as good to type out and hit send, but it's better for this site and the community.

 

[Unxmaal]

My post was not about the merits of any argument in favor of this site our against other folks' opinions. There are many good arguments. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think you all were doing great work and value the perspectives here.

The posts I saw were trolls. We have our own site founded because of the differences outlined in this thread. Going into someone else's house and peeing in their virtual cheerios isn't going to change their mind, nor will it make the community see this site as the more open/accepting SGI user/dev forum.

I get the anger. I get the complaints. If there is a need to reply over there to substantially correct the record, a less confrontational approach would serve everyone better. It may not feel as good to type out and hit send, but it's better for this site and the community.

Per my prior post, dissent is not allowed on Irixnet. Dissent invokes a quick shutdown reply by Raion. Further discussion gets the thread locked or deleted.

This is why I'm voicing my dissent here, where it can't be memory-holed.

 

[kaigan]

Per my prior post, dissent is not allowed on Irixnet. Dissent invokes a quick shutdown reply by Raion. Further discussion gets the thread locked or deleted.

This is why I'm voicing my dissent here, where it can't be memory-holed.

I removed the posts from MJBurton originally, not Raion. I implemented a ban against him. Why? Because they were personal attacks on him, not just his opinions or ideas. The other admins, including Raion, asked to have the thread reinstated and migrated for discussion. The thread was moved and closed after MJBurton came back and continued attacking Raion directly. We also reissued a ban against him after that.

Unxmaal, your comments were welcome in our community and I honestly agreed with your points in that thread. I would love to see further civil discussion between methodologies on both forums. Regardless of Raion's opinions on it, most of the community there sees and supports the work of the developers here at SGUG.

Do I have some concerns about how well SGUG-RSE is going to handle on something like a lower-end Indy? Yeah, but I also haven't tested it and I'm assuming that you guys have thought this through. Do I have concerns that pure MIPSPro-based builds just aren't going to work for newer software? Also yes. Axatax, Micrex22, and others have been looking into that path and we'll see what they come up with.

As Callahan said, this does suck. There's plenty of blame that could be spread around for divisions in the community. My understanding is that Nekochan was full of a lot of that, too, though I haven't been around here long enough to say. This community as a whole has so many talented people with a great love for these old machines and I want to see that flourish.

On the IRIX Network side, please also understand that there are now six administrators, including Raion. There's also a mod team. If you don't like something that any one of us is doing, please talk to the rest of us. If you think there's something we need to do differently, please let us know. I'd like to think that between the group of us, we at least roughly represent a rational, compassionate human being.

Bans against Onre, Northsky, and Praetor were rescinded when the other admins came onboard. You're welcome to join us for discussion at the IRIX Network, and I hope we're welcome here, too. I don't know all of the details of the conversations and mud-slinging that went on between Raion and others here. But if bygones can be, please feel free to stop by. All civil discussion is welcome, but personal attacks are something we can't tolerate. That goes for Raion as much as anyone else.

 

[Unxmaal]

Do I have some concerns about how well SGUG-RSE is going to handle on something like a lower-end Indy? Yeah, but I also haven't tested it and I'm assuming that you guys have thought this through.

As a technical aside:

We specifically limited the scope of SGUG-RSE to Octane-and-newer hardware running IRIX 6.5.30 so that we could focus on shipping something that works.

The patches and specs are published, so it's possible someone could build it for the older platforms and OS versions.

That someone could be us, but I think we're focused on creating a viable set of modern FOSS packages for our scoped targets first.

 

[kaigan]

We specifically limited the scope of SGUG-RSE to Octane-and-newer hardware running IRIX 6.5.30 so that we could focus on shipping something that works.

Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense and given the differences in IRIX support on older systems, it's entirely possible that different approaches will be needed on those systems. We'll have to see how much of a desire there is for it in the community as time goes on.

As an additional note, I do want to say that I personally appreciate the efforts of the developers here. My SGI life would be much more frustrating without Booterizer, as just one example.

 

[onre]

I did not know we've actually limited the scope of SGUG-RSE to anything, and fully intend to try out all our stuff on an Indy in coming weeks.

 

[Elf]

My understanding is that Nekochan was full of a lot of that, too, though I haven't been around here long enough to say. This community as a whole has so many talented people with a great love for these old machines and I want to see that flourish.

It's amazing how much drama surrounds these old computers!
Also I just wanted to say thanks for being an amazing ambassador between the two spaces. The things you say are reasonable and level headed.

It is an interesting situation... as a community we would certainly recommend against trying to troll or otherwise be incendiary or overly negative. I am actually quite glad how calm and civil things have been since we started the user group. The only two people we have had to boot out were pretty much known issues from the beginning, and from there it has been smooth sailing. A good 99.9% of people in the SGI world genuinely seem to want to be nice to each other, and I am glad about that. If this weren't true, it would be difficult to deal with since I think it is nearly impossible to force people to be civil.

That said, like the others, I think this sort of event was inevitable. Sometimes the way Raion speaks tends to get on peoples' nerves, and I've noticed that going all the way back to the Nekochan days even if for the longest time I didn't really have any issue with it. Eventually he blew up at me due to what I posted here (which I thought was relatively tame), and so I just had to stop talking to him. For whatever reason I've been randomly approached by other people even in non-SGI venues like the Retro Computer Discord complaining about, let's just say, some of the less "politically correct" and very personal things he says (to put it mildly).

There are a lot of people here who have put a lot of hard work into various projects, and Raion has been very consistently negative, or even snide in tone when talking about those efforts. So I guess it isn't altogether too surprising when that turns into a public, and very personal dispute. This is classic conflict escalation (a.k.a. Monkey Dance) behavior that is as old as the hills. If one person "starts something," the next person, absent conscious restraint, will usually pick it up from there and hit back harder. This continues until one or both of the participants are on the ground, or until someone backs down.

We should encourage people not to engage in personal attacks, but I think that also goes back all the way to maintaining a respectful and civil tone towards other people and their work even if it doesn't meet our own technical / world view. I think whatever else we can take away from this, it is clear that it was a personal thing. As you say @kaigan, IRIX Network has changed a lot with the introduction of new staff, and strongly for the better! Just given the patterns I have seen over the past few years, I am not sure if the personal fights Raion gets into will ever end, but regardless of whether those come from within, or as I've seen, outside of the SGI community, I hope they don't turn into some community vs. community dynamic. That, certainly, would be unfortunate.

Edit: As an addendum, I like @onre 's approach. I think technical counters to any allegations are the best response, although unfortunately expensive to produce.

 

[kaigan]

Again, with the IRIX Network as a community, the greater "we" of the admin team will do our best to encourage respectful, civil discussion as you do here. Regarding development methods, I would love to see more direct data on how compilers perform across a variety of systems, as well as other tests that might be of help toward future development. I do have a reasonable range of SGI systems, so if there's anything I can help with, please let me know. I'm a mediocre programmer at best as that isn't my personal IT focus, but hopefully I can still be of help.

 

[onre]

I have a bunch of data in form of multiple runs of multiple benchmark suites (we're talking tens of CPU hours) and have written a lengthy report about compiler performance. I'll try to get it posted in coming days. Sneak preview; mostly there is very little speed difference (less than 5 %, often less than 1 %) in generated code and the faster compiler may not always be the one you'd think it'd be.

 

[foetz]

Sometimes the way Raion speaks tends to get on peoples' nerves, and I've noticed that going all the way back to the Nekochan days

There's plenty of blame that could be spread around for divisions in the community. My understanding is that Nekochan was full of a lot of that, too, though I haven't been around here long enough to say.

as one of the longest standing and most active nekochan members i can tell you that for the most part, the neko forum was a very nice place. mature, skilled and helpful people across the board. only in the last 2 or 3 years that changed to some extend. mostly for 2 reasons:

1. shifting priorities. most posts were only about games and other trivialities, giving the impression that the sgis had become colorful hipster-toys of rather clueless owners.
2. a different kind of members. a small number of new, unpleasant members who unfortunately caused quite an impact on the forum as a whole.

of course you don't have to take my word for it. everyone can look that up on archive.org.

please also understand that there are now six administrators, including Raion. There's also a mod team.

but Raion owns the place?

given the patterns I have seen over the past few years, I am not sure if the personal fights Raion gets into will ever end

unfortunately that's unlikely indeed.

 

[kaigan]

I have a bunch of data in form of multiple runs of multiple benchmark suites (we're talking tens of CPU hours) and have written a lengthy report about compiler performance.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it! I've anecdotally heard similar results (on smaller datasets) from a couple of folks on IN, but I'll be interested to see the numbers. I don't have a horse in the race such as it is, I just like shiny numbers.

but Raion owns the place?

All of the admins have access to the administrative front-end. Raion is, as far as I know, the only one with access to the back-end server and billing components. Beyond a few ongoing community donations (which I do contribute to), he handles the cost of upkeep. Functionally, that does mean that he "owns" the site. I'm a consulting security engineer so from a BC/DR perspective it concerns me. It's something that the admin team should discuss but hasn't yet.

 

[massiverobot]

...Raion is, as far as I know, the only one with access to the back-end server and billing components. Beyond a few ongoing community donations (which I do contribute to), he handles the cost of upkeep. Functionally, that does mean that he "owns" the site. ...

IMHO there really needs to be more than just one person w/ access to the infra for any community organization. IN could become Neko all over again in terms of disappearing at the whim of it's owner....

 

[kaigan]

IMHO there really needs to be more than just one person w/ access to the infra for any community organization. IN could become Neko all over again in terms of disappearing at the whim of it's owner....

I agree and it's a definite concern that we'll need to address. Hopefully things are set up accordingly here as well. A repeat of Nekochan's disappearance is something that no one wants for any SGI resource, including those beyond IN and SGUG.

 

[kaigan]

An update on my earlier comments regarding infrastructure - Raion and I have discussed this and we'll be implementing additional plans (some were in place already, actually) to ensure that everything is good in the case of any sort of disaster.

 

[foetz]

Raion is, as far as I know, the only one with access to the back-end server and billing components.

interesting because nekochan being a black box like that is one of the things he criticized back then.

it's a definite concern that we'll need to address.

Raion and I have discussed this and we'll be implementing additional plans (some were in place already, actually)

that's gonna be interesting ...

 

[kaigan]

that's gonna be interesting ...

I don't know about interesting, but useful in case there's a site issue if Raion is ill or inaccessible for a time. The appropriate access has already been granted.