All right, so thank you for joining us My name is Jonathan de Rojas. I work at Bluehost. I am a full-time work as core contributor And I'm here to moderate a discussion with Josepha Hayden Chomposy, did you say it? Chomposy. Okay. So that's how you say that fancy word that fancy name I prefer this mic. She prefers to hold the mic and That's great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do day-to-day? Yes. Well, I Recently became the executive director of the WordPress project Which is most of my day-to-day right now Your project is gigantic. There are like 200,000 of you and 150 word camps a year. I don't go to all of them although I wish I could But before I started doing that what I did a lot of and what I still do now is kind of help people Learn how to communicate better and work together better And so I think that I'm well suited to the WordPress space because of that. Awesome. All right so The topic of this discussion is fostering collaboration across cultures Has anybody read the blog post? Anybody? A couple people. Okay So we'll kind of get into it a little bit what it's about and we are here to take your questions as well So you open up by describing how brains are our prediction machines, but they're influenced by a lot of things such as your stereotypes past experiences and These things often end up being communication barriers, especially in a global project like WordPress So talk about that a little bit Specifically about stereotypes or about Our brains are affected by different things and how that affects how we communicate with people So I have found I've worked with a lot of large teams And now that I'm working with this global project and the teams that I work with are also all over the the planet I've found that That all of the experience that we've had with people that are like you like everyone I've ever met like Sheila and like I have an idea of how this conversation is going to go regardless of whether I want to have that idea or not because your brain is constantly Inundated with information, you know, and so it has a coping mechanism It just pulls together all the information it knows about people who look like Birgit or who look like Angela or or have the same experience that I understand of them and just like Define what that patterns most likely going to be like and and yeah, I found that those stereotypes for the most part are the things that cause us to Not meet people where they are right there.   Everything's fine. I keep pointing out people in the audience There are like ten of you and I know many names.  Yes. Yes. Stay alive, but ignore it so you also talk about something called the negotiation of meaning and Basically, it's would you mind Defining that in your words not at all. How many of you are familiar with the concept of the negotiation of meaning? Wonderful, I love this. Okay, so the negotiation of meaning Is a basic part of communication practices where once you have gathered all the information together The two people or multiple people who are participating in the conversation Make sure that they understand each other so For instance If if I have arrived here and I say to you Jonathan We're gonna have a fireside chat today and your concept of fireside chat is like we're gonna go have individual Conversations with everybody at the table, but my concept is this we have to do that part where it's like, okay So what is my role? What is your role? What is the objective and just making sure that everybody has the same pieces of information and the same pieces of language to communicate about The process or the project that you're taking on so that's a very broad concept of the negotiation of meaning And how does jargon complicate that things that were comfortable saying that not everybody understands Yeah, if any of you have ever seen any of my talks about the project or community or people or working with people So literally anything I ever talk about you've heard me talk about jargon and how it's a bad thing In the WordPress project as a whole we really try to stay away from jargon where we can because for one since we're a Global project it makes it really hard to translate stuff, which you wouldn't think would be real, but it is But it's simple regular phrases are difficult simple regular phrases. So Our designers at the company that I work for I work for automatic refer to like minor changes and and icons and stuff as sprinkles and Every time they say that to me. I'm like, I hear you speaking English. I'm also speaking English But you're on a different planet and so like jargon doesn't even Just adhere to like we're talking about Servers and cloud hosting like it's not even just that it can be as basic as Your current definition based on what we're talking about is not my current definition Sprinkles for me are always on cupcakes sprinkles for our designers are our minor changes that make a delightful experience for users You know rainbow or chocolate sprinkles Rainbow all the time Jimmy's we call him Jimmy's in New England. Yeah, I've learned so much about New England last Come on everybody come visit in a few minutes now So when you're working with different cultures and different languages That's magnified How talk about you were talking with me yesterday about colors and how colors can Are even simple colors like we might think white is white, but another culture white might be something different Yeah, I've talked about that. That was really interesting More show of hands is anyone familiar with the what is it global color survey? What world color survey? Okay, this couple people so in the 1970s there was this survey, which it the methodology was heavily flawed, so it has been Researched in in current times, but in the 1970s there was this research that was done about Colors and how different cultures name them and how they arrive at the names And in general there are apparently 11 to 12 different motifs where people derive the names for colors that they Have and there was a theory and it's harder to track that all colors In are introduced in languages in roughly the same order and that some colors are not Universal concepts like green blue is not a universal concept and and as we were talking about yesterday like white Depending on your concept of what creates a color is either a subtractive or an additive process And so even something as basic as colors where we feel like you know for the most part we understand it But that whole thing with color blindness like I I love talking to people with With differing abilities from mine about their experiences because like I have the luxury of the full depth of my entire Knowledge of being a human who exists as I exist and so like when I talk to people who are colorblind I'm always like I don't I do not understand how I like I can't even comprehend how that looks and and So having those interesting conversations with things that seem super real and universal and integrated in our lives Is always interesting and I think that that's a Specific and really interesting example of that. Yeah, so the example. I gave was well white is the presence of all colors But she said well if you're a painter white is the absence of all other colors And I've never thought of that It's cuz he's in technology and so you add all the colors together and boom you have white But if you had all the colors together as an artist you have murky colors Browns and blacks and yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not not nice colors lovely colors So another thing that you detail is and we'll trade my this is trademarked But the Joseph is five five and five for the fur Five and five for fostering collaborative culture. Yeah. Yeah, so I didn't actually trademark the phrase five But I have been using it for ten years in my presentations practically yours So let's let's go through each one real quick and we'll kind of talk about What your your points are on each so the first one is team tension. Oh Man, this is my favorite thing. So I like to when giving advice to people I like to offer my like subversive advice that people are going to pretend isn't real So when we talk about Integrating teams or working across cultures no matter what your culture is defined as like if you're talking about Americas versus Europe or versus Asia. That's a type of culture But also the example that I use in that blog post is our designers versus our developers When people are talking about how to how to integrate teams and make cultures work better together there's sometimes this idea that That means that everyone has to get along perfectly and everything should be fine and everyone needs to agree And I don't think that's true. I think that if everyone agreed on everything all of the time then diversity wouldn't be an important thing that we have to work on and When we find people who are visually diverse from us but have the exact same life experiences I think that we run into the same problems as we would have run into if we had all of the same looking people You know, and so my subversive piece of advice is that any time that you want a diverse group and interesting Perspective perspectives on things you have to be prepared to have some tension and I don't think that that's a bad thing I Just was in so I'm a singer and I was just in a rehearsal on Monday where our conductor was like I don't want to say tension because tension is a bad word and the thing that I say in that blog post is It doesn't matter like tension is needed if you're going to have diversity It's just that you have to find a way to take that and make it into jazz as opposed to discordant noise That resonates for wordpressers because we super love jazz If I ever find something where I can like make a quotable nugget about barbecue y'all will be the first to know But until then you have me with jazz. Hopefully it comes with samples Yes Music is is actually a very common background for developers and designers. I find A lot of musicians and wordpress. Yeah, we do. It's this I think it's similar. There's a lot of structure to both and There's different methodologies and it kind of translates well I'm gonna tell you another subversive thing y'all get to today most of the time people just get one I think that development is a creative process Languages so science and math and music. I think is all in the same basic part of the brain It's then the language and processing part of the brain because all of these things are semantic Like it's all trying to say something but putting something together in a particular language so that it communicates the end product Whatever that end product might be infinite possibilities with it. Yeah. Yeah, so when I hear people are like, oh, I'm a musician I can't be in technology like I don't agree with them at all Matt Mullenwijk the founder of the co-founder of wordpress is a musician. I'm a musician We're just wandering around doing these things. I think it's totally normal to have a music background here. Yes Okay, the next one was respect and accountability. Oh, so this This is for this was from the team lead section You have to treat others with respect but hold yourself personally accountable I think it totally makes sense to say treat others with respect, but that other part for leaders sometimes is really hard I don't believe in the concept of being vulnerable for vulnerability's sake But I do believe that all of our leaders should be vulnerable, especially when it comes to hey Micah I said this thing that I assumed about you and I was wrong. I'm really sorry about that I'll do better in the future like that's it If you identify that you're because we're human beings and we can't be perfect But I think that the only way that leaders can can move through that and create a Sense of belonging and safety with the people that they're working with is to say I Offended you and I didn't realize it and I'm sorry I'll do better and I don't think there's anything wrong with holding yourself personally accountable for those things So I didn't offend Micah. He's I don't think No, he's just okay He didn't get up and leave so that's good. Not today The next one was having a North Star. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I talk about this a lot so For many of you who did not know that I currently am the executive director of things You probably did not read my leadership post because it totally didn't matter to you It was just like random news and you're like, okay, great But I talked about it there and I talked about it in the last The thing that I did in London, so it comes up for me a lot and I think it's important. I Really feel like if we don't know where we share our common understanding understandings of things for instance in the middle of negotiation of meaning and you don't say and that's our end goal And here's why What you end up doing is just like micromanaging people all the way to some unknown Destination and you get tired and fatigued and they get tired and fatigued and like Small iterative cycles like that makes sense in some spaces But I think and anyone who's worked with me closely knows that I'm always like that is our end goal This is the general story arc of how we're gonna get there As long as you're kind of going that way like I mostly don't care how you get there except for like There's this thing that's super wrong. Don't do that everything else like figure it out that way And I think that's really important. Otherwise people don't know How to row together and where they're rowing to I'm just gonna use a lot of metaphors in here We kind of talked about this a little bit, but jargon free is the way to be What you have anything to add to that? No, okay. Yes, I do Just it's just There there are things that when you speak specifically in jargon you're trying to accomplish one of the things that You try to accomplish is to prove how much smarter you are than other people And I when I was a teenager definitely wanted to be the smartest person in the room all the time and Thankfully I stopped that because like it's great to be the smartest person in the room I guess but like if you're the smartest know it all person and no one understands you and no one wants to work With you then it doesn't matter what you can do because no one will do it with you, you know Yeah And it's more of that meeting people where they are like there's no point in trying to prove that you're smarter than everybody And there's also no point in trying to distance yourself and make it clear that there's an us versus them like It's really easy to get into into camps because all people want to know that they fit somewhere Right and we want to know that we belong yeah And so the us versus them a little bit turns into like this is my us And I don't care who the them is like this is my us and just making it super clear that you Don't want other people to belong with you doesn't make any sense to me And so that's why I always fight for no jargon in the WordPress space And I know that people really want it and you know some things we have to and so we're we're working on a Glossary for the WordPress.org site so that everyone will know what we're talking about all the time And I'm so excited. I love it And then the last one proximity aids familiarity Yes How many of you are familiar with the meme of the get-along shirt? Great another thing I get to teach you today. So there's this meme out there Or these two children are there they're put in a one giant shirt Because they've been fighting and so their parents method for getting them to stop fighting is to put them in one big Shirt and they have to cooperate on everything for the whole day and it says get along on it That's that's terrible don't recommend that to any I don't recommend that to parents probably You can find a nicer way to do it but I have found over the course of my career leading people and and helping to mentor leaders that when you have people who Are saying I don't like working with this person. I don't like working with designers I don't like working with developers We don't get better at that by just like Wishing for it to change like we all are people and we have to practice those things And so I have found the best way to get people to like figure out that they actually don't hate each other's be like Hey, I know you don't quite get along But there's this really important project and you unite them around the process and around the project and convince them to kind of put their egos aside for a second and do something that is productive toward the same space and I With some notable exceptions found that that was really helpful for them for me, too The notable exceptions were definitely not in wordpress. It's all fine. Okay. Those are all the notes I had from reading your blog post Fantastic, what else would you like to add? Well, um, so we want to get to everybody's questions. Yeah, I think we're right on something I think we could open it up for some questions I I know we're not live streaming But if you all want to share with Twitter that people can share their questions And I have a colleague down here to help us get them from Twitter in case they show up You can of course tweet with the hashtag WC ATL But also the hashtag sassy pickle so that we can find you slash I can find you later to answer the questions on Twitter except I was told yesterday that I didn't answer one from Miami and I have to go back and answer that totally gonna do it You might have to find her in six months and tell her to answer your uh, yeah Yeah, my annuals like three months ago. Okay sassy pickle not bad. Yes Let's take some questions about about leader not leadership. What are we talking about fostering? Collaboration and then I'll tell you about why I'm a sassy pickle So is there any questions? Quite like we would have these phone calls at all hours and and this was really You just said that because I had in my mind like what my role was in it, you know, what different countries And I've never considered like we could have collaborated better and yeah It's something that we like knew that wasn't even thought of. Yeah, just that was really fascinating But I'm not sure I got what five and five. Oh, okay I'll explain both those things first off five and five refers to Just a structure of my presentations that I give where I give five pieces of advice on One side of a coin and five pieces of advice on another side of the coin And so the sides of the coin in this case were people who are leading from the front versus people who are leading from within And so that's all that that was about It's not like a product. It's just a thing I say So the quest the other question was about That first piece of advice that I gave to leaders where you have to expect some tension in teams where you're where you're Fostering collaboration. I wanted to call to everyone's attention this fantastic resource called the cultural atlas And the URL is culturalatlas.sbs.com.au It was pulled together by Sbs which is an Australian basically public broadcasting system like we have here And it specifically is geared toward their primary migrant cultures and they did a lot of excellent research and it's kind of a living resource for them, but Yeah, so especially when you're working in in a global space and you have all of these cultures The difficulty is that we hardly know where those cross cultures Cross-cultural connections are happening because At this point with WordPress for sure, but probably with your group also like every collection of my of majorities that you have is made up in any number of minority groups, right and so finding a way to Respectfully get people to to give you the information that you need is really important finding out like if if I'm working with Primarily Dutch company. What is the best way for me to manage the overall negotiation process and their methods of communication and and like how How funny you're allowed to be or whatever it is? And and doing your best to meet people where they are it doesn't work As far as like expect some tension to just be like everyone get in there and hope Hope it all works out like you've got to do some of the advanced work as a leader to say Hey, it sounds like we have some miscommunication here when you said this thing is this what you meant over there? And then you have to facilitate that negotiation of meaning section sometimes It would be wonderful if the negotiation of meaning meeting Meaning happened at the beginning of things and lasted forever, but it's kind of a cycle You negotiate the meaning and then you discover that there's this new cross-cultural space And then you have to negotiate some more meaning in there just kind of over and over as a cycle Does that answer the question a bit? Yeah Hi, we have we had a mic coming around. I think we lost it. I am the mic Well, we'll just try to repeat the question for the for the people on the video and I'll repeat it for the video We're getting a thumbs up We did it Thank you One of the things that I do when I'm starting a new group Developing mentors to work with newbies. I make the mentors Do an exercise in listening skill? Yes, and so they sit chairs back-to-back So they're facing opposite directions and I give them interesting characters I buy online in one year. I used Arabic letters Because Americans don't know Arabic letters and one person has to describe it. The other person has to draw it Wow And then the exercise is reversed so they get both sides and then there's a general conversation Difficult that was and how what they said was not translated into the drawing And so I think that the conversation About starting early is really part of my commitment to doing that right from the get-go You know that when the team comes together exercises like that could be a great way for saying We've got to find the common ground We've got to use language that we all will agree to you So I just think that what you've shared today is really priceless information I'll put it in recording. This was a lovely compliment. It's all up there Yeah, I'm not very good at Pictionary for the record John John fail getting people to guess it So so this was this was kind of a A Kind of talking about team team Connections and team building exercises a little bit. Yeah An interesting thing that I noticed recently about team building I think by the way that as a as a collective group of human beings We are about to move into a newer More modern concept of leadership that is not about like scare everyone and hope they do what you need them to do Like I'm that's we're past that now and I'm glad of it Because I remember in my first number of team building experience as I ever had it basically was like put them in a dire situation So they feel bonded by the fear like why would you do that? They're like put them in a giant tree and make them zip line down and like that was how we did team building And hearing about this exercise. This was a listening exercise for anyone who did not hear where you give Up to a pair one of them describes in this case an Arabic alphabet Character and the other one has to draw it and then they switch So that everyone kind of has that shared experience of we don't all communicate the same way And we don't all visualize things the same way and yeah, absolutely I love hearing new team building exercises that are based on like uncovering our basic Understandings as human beings as opposed to our basic understandings as things that want to not die in our dumb dumb brains See it was really useful.  You know it would come in handy Anybody else any other questions? Yes Trying to get to know somebody from another culture That is a fantastic question the question is if you're getting to know someone from a new culture What are like the top three things you can ask? To make sure that you get to know them better in an office setting in a working together setting I think that the things that are important in my mind to know are One like how literal are you going to take things? How how much can I use humor to soften the blow? How direct do I have to be or can I be? The other thing that I think is always important to know is whether whether Whether they primarily want the relationship to be transactional or if they do want to have the opportunity to get to know you as a person there are varying scales of that like Work spaces are by nature transactional, but if you're working in Distributed spaces like I do and like most WordPress volunteers do at least when they're volunteering you have to know like Do you want me to have small talk before I have conversations with you? and then generally asking people how they how they Best take direction for themselves like they will know whether it's best if you write it down ahead of time and give it to them And then they can ask questions or if you can just show up to the meeting and be like hey I've got this new task here all the things so they can ask questions then So just asking them how they need the information. There is this thing that I use With my teams It's called I call it Personal operating manual and so everyone on my team and I don't I don't have these anymore because I don't have lots of direct reports Like this now, but when I had When I was managing teams every person had their own notebook Where I wrote down like what motivated them and how they preferred to get information and how they preferred to participate in Meetings and if they needed things ahead of time so that they had time to like Think through it and research it and so like I knew for each of my team my team members What it was that that made them want to continue to come to work and how I could meet them Where they were as far as how they needed to be communicated with and how they needed to take feedback and how I Could best set them up for personal success with the work that I was asking them to do so personal operating manual That is a thing that is is google-able everyone knows about it But I loved it so and some of those things are things you might have to find out Through working with someone you might not be able to directly say how direct do you want me to be right? But you might have to experiment a little bit and what's the best way for you to figure that out from people? Yeah, for sure good point Yes Yeah Same this this was a follow-on comment to a couple of the last questions we had which was saying Go to the resources that exist the consulate for the country if you're going to be doing a lot of work in that space and Yeah Foreign chambers of commerce. Yes, excellent And You know so they're going to have to get prepared if they are an American person and now they're going to be interviewed by a panel of Chinese Professionals to see whether or not they qualify to go on to the competition in China Somebody somewhere needs to be able to say hello I Say Colby KOLB assessment Yeah, yeah, it's a print assessment. What was the second one a print assessment? We have about 15 minutes left that what those that was a note that you can add additional Testing into your hiring process with the Colby something and the print assessment operating. Yeah to the personal operating manual I think we have time for one more question, and I think it's Birgit American clients and so we were talking about all the different options and then There was this comment from the client. Okay. Well, let's do it this way And this was for me is a German decision. Yes, that is written with a capital B. Yeah So that's where we move forward So but that was not understood at the American India was just kind of all one of the options And let's try and play around with it for a bit, but I kind of And then of course And then what happened was that the decision was reverse. Yeah, so kind of okay So and then I read up about it that that's kind of Germans right decision of the capital D and Americans right of those quality. Yeah, and there's also a lot of cultures out there A lot of cultures How do you navigate that kind of thing So I wish I had a clear answer the question is how do you navigate? How do you navigate? Situations where the expectation around what you have done are different. So in this example, it was a decision Forever versus like I think this is the decision I think we should explore this as our option like how how concrete something is I wish I had an answer for like how you manage it because That would be excellent, but I've not actually explored how I got to the point where I am with that So I've been working with global teams for gosh almost a decade now I Don't feel old you feel old And and I know that when I started doing that I ran into problems like that all the time where I would say something Confidently because like confidence is a thing we value in America And the confidence came across as oh well I guess we're doing that from this person who's definitely not in a decision-making capacity You know and the people would do things because I'd been so confident and then I was like, ah, no I can't make final choices. Don't do that. I have learned Over time how to manage that better, but I don't know if it's so much like This is how I learned how to do it as as much as it was at some point I learned that The voice that I have is not inconsequential and it hasn't been in inconsequential for a long time And so learning to be more careful with the way that I Manage discussions and the way that I contextualize like this is something that I'm interested in discussing I don't have the all the answers yet Help me figure out where I could be wrong about it like learning to be Aware of the fact that that with a big voice comes To sound straight big responsibilities, you know like we have a number of people in the WordPress community across our entire ecosystem who are who people look to as like trendsetters and Sometimes when they are not aware of that like they can make off-handed remarks about something that's happening or not happening and change the course of an entire career on accident and so I learned that in a really Not as as high-stakes space as as the work that I do now And I'm glad that I did because I think that a lot of people don't have the luxury of like The only error that I made was to make someone make a set of charts that took them 10 hours And now I feel like a jerk like that that was the biggest extent of of my Errors that helped me learn that but like if I think about Had I tried to do that learning from this stage, you know from this stage in my career like how awful I Could have made some people's lives. It's it's humbling and also sometimes terrifying But I don't have a quick answer other than like go make some Non-consequential mistakes, which is not useful advice We kind of see that a lot in work as core too No, I do when a ticket might get open and then I might brain dump into the ticket But someone will take it as direction and then three hours later There's a patch and it's a big patch. You know, we still have to think about things before we write code So it's even a problem with that. It's very hard to communicate emotion and text and intent Yeah, and you'll notice that in in any post that I put up where it's not a final decision Like I put it in the title. I'm like discussion the first thing so that's what comes up in people's RSS feeds It comes up in their emails It comes up as they're reading it unless they don't read the title which that's true for some people and I can't make them People don't read the post but they still comment. Yeah, also that also that but yeah contextualizing what you expect out of the conversation is Feels cumbersome when you start doing it. It feels uncomfortable, but I think it's really valuable To avoid, you know, exactly things like that people who are like well Jonathan said it so now we must Do we have time for a quick So here we'll do we'll wrap up and we'll Jonathan and I will be out there and you all can come and ask us additional questions Thank you so much for having me today everyone Thank you


Censorship by algorithm does far more damage than conventional censorship. Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who've been sufficiently critical of official Western narratives over the last few years. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares Cook writes, then as the algorithms tightened it became thousands. Now as they throttle me further shares can often be counted in the hundreds. Going viral is a distant memory. I won't be banned he adds. I will fade incrementally like a small star in the night sky, one among millions. Gradually eclipsed as its neighboring suns grow bigger and brighter.  Cook says this began after the 2016 US election which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate fake news from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must quell information rebellions and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to prevent the fomenting of discord online. Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9-11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump's election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who've lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and their new follows slashed. By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on. In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works I have 330,000 followers but they've stopped showing my posts to many people redacted to night host Lee Kamp tweeted in January 2018 I used to gain 6,000 followers a week now I gain 500 and Facebook unsubscribes people without their knowledge so my total number never increases. I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It wasn't until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media outlets blanket permission to republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all. And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to disprove the false right wing narrative that Google only censors rightist voices the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to algorithmically throttling world socialist website. Last year the CEO of Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate authoritative sources while suppressing borderline content not considered authoritative which apparently even includes just marginally establishment critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kalinsky. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Vincent said in 2018 that if the platform's fact checkers who include the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council rule that Facebook users have been posting false news moderators will quote dramatically reduce the distribution of all their page level or domain level content on Facebook end quote. People make a big deal anytime a controversial famous person gets removed from a major social media platform and rightly so. We cannot allow such brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to normalize internet censorship on every front and the powerful will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is entirely irrelevant. It's not about them. It's about expanding and normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms. But far far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren't authorized by the powerful are being hidden from public view while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix. It doesn't matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak, even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth, you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room. That's the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the Western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information and even actively helping them along that path as in, for example, Google's research grants from the CIA and NSA. It's possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it. You've probably noticed this if you tried to search YouTube for videos which don't align with the official narratives of Western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic, like it was reading your mind. Now it's almost impossible to find the information you're looking for unless you're trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. It's the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of interaction like Twitter as well. The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make non-compliant voices disappear from view so slowly you won't even notice as Cook put it. The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying. We appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between nuclear armed nations and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the need for the status quo to shift so that we can begin organizing a mass scale push toward healthier systems and that's never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way it is. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world and as more and more people get their information about what's going on in the world from online sources. Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.


Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Stuart Rogers from Terricks Minerals. How are you today? Great. Thanks, Rocky. Stuart, I was just explaining to our team how much I enjoyed the Lara Smith piece on TerraX. Analyst says TerraX may be the next major player to emerge onto the Gold scene. Is it because of where you're located or what do you think is Analyst Lara Smith's angle on why she thinks you're going to become one of the next big players? I think that really speaks to the fact that we are a district, now a definite district. We've tripled the size of our line position within the last year from 120 nisquare kilometers to 420 square kilometers. It's highly prospective land. We have almost prospective land on either side of a major break in a known gold cap, such as Yellowknife, where we already have identified high-grade resources on the property. In this particular district, is it not true that they've already taken out what, 14 million ounces of gold? Exactly right. We have all the undeveloped ground north and south of those past-producing mines and to the east on the other side of the break. The best place to find gold is right beside past-producing mines. So in this district scale, this very large-scale project that we have happening here just outside of Yellowknife, correct? Yes, Jason from Yellowknife. In particular, you just announced that you just commenced a new drilling program. Can you give us an update about this high-grade scale gold project that you are leading? What we're doing is we're not going to be drilling yet. This is the first summer we've had an opportunity to do initial fieldwork on the property. The other 290 square kilometers that we've acquired. So we started in June with fieldwork mapping and sampling, identified showings on the new areas that we have. We've done airborne surveys, a LIAR survey, which helps in structural analysis of the project. We are flying airborne geophysics and we are doing magnetic surveys on the ground. So we're getting prepared for drilling and identifying these targets. So it's going to be a district-wide drill program when we begin, which will be later in the season. So we also noticed that both Alan Sexton has joined his VP of exploration and of course Russ Starr has joined his board of directors. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Well, you know, Alan Sexton is a very experienced individual. He worked with Joe Cabell at Maldeen, which was Joe's discovery a number of years ago, which is now being put in production by Agnico Legal. It's one of their highest-grade, fastest-growing deposits. Alan Sexton was his project manager on that for 7 years. So he understands how to develop and, you know, a major district-scale project. So he's going to be in the field, on site, leading exploration efforts to develop this. And he's an individual that's done it before. You know, Russell is the resume speaks for itself. He's a good guy. He's, you know, identified major projects. He's been successful in marketing them and introducing them to major players such as Agnico. I guess their name keeps coming up all the time. And, you know, he's got a lot of good contacts, a lot of insight that can help us move the project forward as well. So Stuart, what should we as shareholders expect over the next couple of quarters? We expect new flow from the results from our field exploration. Well, I think from what we've seen so far, we've been in the field and we've got over a thousand samples. We have 400 in the lab. We have results from that field work. I think you're going to see new targets develop, which is what you really want. We've tripled the size of the lab project. But what we want to see is gold. And, you know, so far with our field exploration, we're getting encouragement. So not only did we acquire additional ground, it looks like it's out of perspective. So you're going to see the results of that, the results of the surveys, and then you're going to see a drill again. So, you know, sending new flows with us, the project. We are currently promoting Junior Gold Rally Week, telling our investor intel audience that now is the time to really look at gold, because all of our analysts are anticipating a gold bull market this fall. What are your thoughts on this, Stuart? I can hardly wait. Well, thank you for joining us today. Thank you.


Okay, so we are letting the most interesting talk we have been waiting all day to hear for the end Tom Marble has been a contributor to this Benjava for many many years now And we really look forward to hearing about this exciting thing Thank you Pablo So You know, I know it's really a hard slot to be kind of the last slot at the end of the day So I really appreciate you coming out To hear about jigsaw and Debian This is really what I wanted to to talk to you about and just to give you a sense of what I want to cover I want to give you a sense of what I am and what I'm not going to talk about today for regarding jigsaw and Some of the background that we've actually already covered in terms of jar hell and and so on and how jigsaw is hoping to address that And in particular what it is about Debian that makes it a really good fit or there's a real good opportunity for us to leverage the work that's being done in upstream and then Some links and hopefully an opportunity to have further discussion about this and how we might how we might use it in the project So just a little bit about me for background I've actually got a master's in electrical engineering and that means I like hardware as well as software and I spent most of my professional life doing software and I spent A little over 10 years working at Sun Microsystems initially I was actually in technical sales, which was a strange Way to get into Sun, but it was pretty interesting and I learned a lot from that experience and as soon as I could I transitioned into Java R&D and Had a position in the Java performance group Which was a really an eye-opening experience really? Really interesting one of the things that we did was to automate performance testing for the JVM itself You heard Stefano talking about automating testing for for Debian earlier today, and I am a huge fan of that and then I you know I Actually started using Debian in around 2003 and in 2006 Sun had realized that Java was not very well integrated on Linux platforms and Decided to do something about it, and so I got involved in relicensing Java For redistribution, so this is only point one of the DFSG and is obviously non-free But represented an enormous amount of work within Sun to change the attitude and actually get the legal Team on board with relicensing Java So this was kind of controversial, but it was really the first step on the path to open JDK Which was a fully free implementation of Java and One of the things that's bringing me back to Java is I'm interested in a couple of different things one is software transaction Management Yes, yeah memories transactional software transactional memory Sorry and for large-scale systems, and then also I'm interested in embedded development and Java seems to be a really good platform for those two things so what I want to talk about is really just specifically about You know kind of what the goals are for the jigsaw project and a little bit about it and Really focus on what's relevant to Debian or what I think is really appropriate to discuss with Debian But but that's only a part of the story of jigsaw I'm not even going to try to Cover all of the technical elements of jigsaw It's it's fairly involved. I'm also not going to try and talk about open JDK in general but modularizing the JDK involves touching many many parts of the platform There are language changes VM changes class file changes compiler changes and Mark Reinhold gave a really excellent talk at Devox, which is linked off of the jigsaw website that gives a great overview of the project and Some of the approaches that were taken and in particular one that I found really interesting was discussing refactoring the JDK and Some of the struggles that they had in doing that As many of you know the JDK brings along with it a whole bunch of stuff like Corba and XML and all sorts of things that you know your application might never use and yet It's we're stuck with it and so there's some really good I'd really recommend that presentation to get some more detail another thing that I I could be tempted to talk about but I'm not going to our earlier efforts towards modularizing the Java platform notably JSR 277 and Related JSRs and I also don't want to get in too much to debate about OS GI although we talked a little bit earlier about how OS GI is really an approach to handling modularity above the platform and The idea of jigsaw is to actually make it a first-class citizen inside the platform All of you know what it's like to be in hell Jar hell is a particularly nasty flavor of hell And you know in Debian we've enjoyed being Elevated away from hell for a long time, but for Java unfortunately it remains I was actually amazed to find that there's a wiki page that explains jar hell But there is and you know just to recap some of the highlights There's this problem of have if you have multiple versions of a jar on a class path You may get some from one or some from the other or a little bit from both and that of course causes a lot of problems It's quite possible that your dependency graph has a mismatch somewhere where you know dependency a requires You know c and dependency B requires c prime and c and c prime were conflicted so that that causes a problem But the thing that we're most familiar with in trying to package Java is this darn thing about how People seem to be comfortable sticking binary blobs in their upstream And that is of course the source of a lot of refactoring trouble. So what is jigsaw? This is a mercurial forest which is based off of open JDK trunk So open JDK along with a number of other Sun now formerly Sun open source projects chose mercurial as the version control system and So there is a mercurial forest of jigsaw that you can get from the open JDK website and the idea is that the JDK is handles both mod modules and versions as You can see so that we never get into the situation where there is Ambiguity about which version of a module is being used and in short The goal is to get rid of the class path so The approach that jigsaw is taking for these requirements is implemented in the following features. So one of the one of the challenges about Speed and also predictability of which version you're going to get is going to be handled by resolving some of those issues at install time Using a kind of registry system Feature subsets as I mentioned your application may not need all of the apis that are in the JDK so it's really doesn't make sense to drag them all along and Multimodual packages will allow you to select just that part of the dependency graph that you actually need and By the way, the idea is that this will apply not just to the JDK, but also to user applications as well Substitutability, I'm not even sure if that's a word, but I took that word from Mark Reinhold Is this idea of having a virtual module or you know what we might say in Debian as it provides? So this is really a completely uncontroversial concept for Debian But it's kind of new for Java as is having optional modules And the idea of self applicability is that this actually applies to the JDK itself So I'm stealing a slide here from Alex Buckley's presentation about jigsaw I don't want to go into too much detail about you know the technical implementation of jigsaw for the most part. You still have directories like comfoo, you know my compilation unit dot Java and Organized in a tree the difference is that you have some magic Java files called module-info dot Java or Package-info dot Java which are in your tree that give the metadata that you would otherwise get from let's say OSGI and So what this slide is showing you is a way of handling multiple versions of modules and explains that Java C may have its own version of a particular module and it has its own resolution system for choosing which one is The right one and the one they refer they refer that to that as the magic class path, which is actually inside the running JVM One of the tricky points and I'll just make this aside now about about Leveraging the modular JVM is that the heuristics for the JVM doing this Resolution of which is the right version may differ from the heuristics of P package So that's something that we will have to to to watch carefully But here's the promise right today if you just take open JDK 6 You know on disk It's 136 megabytes if I have a hello world application I can you know just a very simple hello world application 425 bytes I end up with an enormous amount of consumption just around hello world But if I was I took a stab at trying to Build hello world with jigsaw with just the essential base package and I'm guessing that it's 30 kilobytes And I'll you'll become obvious later why I don't have the exact answer here But the idea is that you know we can cut down our on disk space and in memory space Significantly in fact performance is a huge huge motivation for jigsaw so the whole idea and I have to give a lot of credit to upstream because they they have looked at Debian as an example of Why this packaging or this modularity would would be applicable and how it would integrate with an operating system And their idea is very deliberately that there would be a one-to-one mapping between Java jigsaw modules and Debian packages So you have this sort of idea and this is what the kind of Syntax that you might see within a module dash info. Java file is My module with a particular version provides a virtual provides a particular version and has a certain number of depends Or as they say requires There are other constructs that are in the Description of a module there's one that I Understand why they did it, but I think it'll be really difficult to to map that carefully into Debian And that's this idea of a permits statement and the idea permits is that they're basically saying that My module will only permit The specified set of modules to depend upon it it's as if it's controlling who can have an art depends on it and The idea is that that way you could conceivably have a secret module somewhere and that concept doesn't map particularly well into Debian, but I just thought I would mention it So this is obviously a complete abuse of trying to map jigsaw to Debian So I just picked one job application at random which is free mind And at the bottom you see some excerpts from the control file and at the top I tried to put in you know sort of roughly what you might see in a jigsaw module declaration Obviously, there's there's a there's a couple of things that you notice right away In in Debian, there are a lot of different expressive ways that you can Did talk about version relationships? We had a really good discussion earlier about what does it mean to have backwards compatibility and again? One of the great things about Debian is that Debian packages have a version string And it's very well-defined and you can do a compare on two version strings and find out which one is later and my understanding from jigsaw is that they're kind of leaving that version string to be completely free format which means that comparison is going to be very difficult and You know understanding what what's compatible or expressing the kinds of things that you can express in these operators here might be very difficult that being said I think that there is There's something to build on and this is just in one way of highlighting the mapping between jigsaw Debian So one of the things that comes up a lot with upstream in particular is Deploying a solution is or deploying new functionality in the Java platform is rarely done or is it well Isn't done unless it can be done in a cross-platform way And this is where Debian has a really I think unique opportunity to leverage this work of modularizing the JVM There's all these benefits that we talked about for modularization But if you think about it, there are very very few operating systems that can actually do this, right? Debian obviously has all the infrastructure to handle this and do it really well Other good new Linux systems could do this a bunch who obviously could inherit this very easily Fedora probably could as well although as I mentioned there will probably be some fuzz as any of you who've tried to harmonize the Fedora dependency graph at the Debian dependency graph. It's not exactly a one-to-one mapping. So there's a little bit of fuzz. I Don't know a lot about BSD. I know that there are various approaches to packaging in the BSD world So there that might be possible I Just had I just I just met someone interesting the other day from Nexenta who pointed out to me that there is going to be an announcement tomorrow That might have an impact on People that are passionate about open Solaris. I don't know anything about it I don't know what it means if you want to know more go to alumos.org and get the announcement of that Obviously open Solaris or Solaris historically has suffered from a horrible system 5 packaging system And there's a new packaging system called IPS Which is hopefully a little bit better and if those of you have seen something like Nexenta Which really leverages Debian packaging you see how much even better that is but there's an opportunity for jigsaw to work with that I don't know a lot about Mac OS development But my experience with it is it's kind of wonky and I think it'll be there isn't really this there isn't really the the discipline of Decomposition and interdependency that we have in the Debian world and of course windows is completely a nightmare as there's no Infrastructure for handling this and it would have to be almost developed from scratch So for that reason Debian is uniquely qualified. I think to handle to handle Modularity in the Java platform So one of the neat things that that upstream did is they created this this Program called j-package and it's really nifty. It's sort of like It you know, it's sort of like Java helper if you could imagine that being upstream And what it does is it takes all of your all of your Java class files And it does something magic and out the end you get binary devs What yeah, right? I mean, it's really cool, you know, um Except there's a couple of little problems, which I'll get into in the next slide One of the things that I appreciate is that they included a demonstration of how this works And I wanted to highlight the path for you because you might not you might not stumble across this in the tree in the Source tree for for jigsaw It says it's in this directory that says Solaris But then in the make file down below it says this will only work on a Debian system, which is I think pretty pretty funny But you run me I didn't actually do this because you look at the code and you run make and it runs this shell script Which ends up doing a bunch of d-package Installations and removals and some other things that are you know You might feel a little bit uncomfortable trying to do on your live system I actually tried to do that in a charoot and had some trouble with that as well and Right here. You'll see why I went to install the base module from jigsaw on my shiny New Debian charoot and you'll find out that just something trivial the version number doesn't comply with Debian policy And so that makes our tools barf And we can't install it Which is really a shame And I think that their idea and I you know mark says in his talk that they want it to be very flexible about version strings But the trouble is we can't be flexible about version strings without breaking Debian So we have to we have to handle that problem And of course the one that I knew was going to be a problem is all the other parts of Debian policy I couldn't even run lintian correctly because of the the version string thing, but already you know You see there's a whole button. This is just one of many packages So there's a lot of stuff to do to get if we want to get this packaged correctly so you know What's neat about what jigsaw has done is it's broken the JDK up into? 126 different depths And That's really neat and here I've from Mark's presentation. I've stolen a graph I actually created an actual dot file from for graph is of the 126 packages But I knew you wouldn't be visible at the resolution on this screen And maybe I'll do that in SVG and publish that so you can play around with it, but Here you can see big chunks of functionality that I'll show you big sort of clusters of functionality and jigsaw so that if you really only need the base Module you don't have to get all this other junk or if you're doing just a gooey client You don't need all of this other junk and which is which is really really nice I Hear I don't know exactly what precedent there is in Debian for having a source package produce 126 or more binary packages, but I'm guessing this might be a little bit awkward And we might need to think carefully about how to do it Should just work okay Well, that's that's what I love about Debian is stuff just works So Why do you want jigsaw? Well part of it is smaller download size smaller size on disk Obviously smaller memory footprint and because of that you get faster startup time Most importantly is that we'll get you know module versioning that matches Debian and hopefully Have a basis for solving jar hell in all of our upstream packages that were we're packaging So there's a lot of reasons why it would be nice But I realized when I was sort of talking to people about this and thinking about it That this is actually part of a larger issue that I want to bring to your attention And that is what do we do about Java free Java and Debian going forward a long time has come has You know has gone since you know JDK 6 came out JDK 7 hasn't come out And I'd like to speculate just a little bit about what is the future of upstream because I think it might have a bearing on What we decide to do You'll notice for those of you that have been following the Java community process that there isn't a platform 7 JSR Which is kind of the upstream approach to deciding what is JDK 7 and this is Due to the long-standing among other things probably the long-standing debate between the Apache software foundation and formerly Sun about the field of use restriction and in Java and As a result the JCP has basically been stalled and so the question That I think we all can ask is what does it mean for? Sun Java 7 or what what? Can we make any reasonable prediction about a release and make any release kind of decisions around that and I Think that it's very hard to know I've pressed my friends at Oracle a lot for answers to this on and off the record and They basically can't tell me anything so I don't know what we can infer from that I know a lot of work has gone into this you'll see on the on the open JDK website There's a whole calendar of milestones that has been followed But that calendar of milestones doesn't list any milestones after September of this year So I don't know if that means that they would plan to release at that time or they'll make more milestones or what would happen That being said a lot of cool development has gone into JDK 7 alpha if you will end up stream and I think that Debian is in a position to consider packaging that There are a lot of features that are in JDK 7 and I put a link here in the slides and I'll show the slides Couple of things that I really want to call out to your attention. One is jigsaw one is the modularity Another one is tail recursion is supported natively and this is potentially a huge huge performance benefits So the just to give you a sense of this If you have Function a that calls function B and function B that calls function C Every time you change that context you've got to push things under the stack change change your context and go to the new function And the idea of tail calls or tail recursion is that you can basically push things In such a way that you basically transition from a to b so that when C finishes it returns directly to a So if you have a recursive Function, you're not going to pay this huge penalty of bloating the stack with a bunch of return values That basically are sitting there that you don't really need all that stuff on the stack at all collapses at the end when the final call is done So I'll explain why that could be pretty interesting in a second Lambda expressions anonymous functions are supported in in open JDK 7. There's the invoke dynamic by code Which is been shown to have some huge benefits for interpreted languages like Jay Ruby and Jaitan That that's related to that you can garbage collect Dynamic classes or that's separate I think that it's separate Did that made it to JDK 7 or invoke dynamic?  I don't know Another another thing is some of you may may recall from Java 5 one of the things that was a big addition There was the concurrency utilities from Doug Lee, which was JSR 166 and there's some new extensions to that and JDK 7 Called fork join which is just this idea that you can create kind of a pool of Subprocesses and then collect the results later so in terms of a different metaphor or tool for parallelism That could be a good one And so as we get into obviously more and more multi-core and multi-CPU systems doing concurrency I think is going to be really important So what are the applications of modularity? Well Obviously one of the ways that we could use this is or use JDK 7 in general is to support all the new features, but it's specifically for modularity. I think it could be very helpful for Things like mobile and embedded where you really need to have a small footprint You need to have short startup time and some of the other performance related features could be really important for other JVM based languages like Clojure and JRuby and Jython and so on and in fact one of the things that I mentioned about My interest here is Clojure in particular because you know I like you know working in a Lisp dialect probably even better than I work like working in the Java programming language And Clojure is a really interesting take on this. It's based on the JVM and it has a lot of idioms for concurrent programming and immutability and so on and it is getting a lot of attention as a software transactional memory Architecture so for high-performance systems I think it's a really interesting thing and wouldn't it be great if we could build Clojure to take advantage of tail calls and fork join and we could do that within Debian and Before all of the committees necessarily settle down and decide exactly, you know how they want to standardize that on the JVM language summit wiki there is a list of Requests to upstream for improving the JVM and Rich Hickey who's the author of Clojure has a number of things that he wants out of the JVM Some of which have been done some of which have been worked on some of which haven't been started yet One of the things that I'd love to do is I'd like to I'd love to have something like a shebang like been OJC Where oh is open JDK? J is jigsaw and C is Clojure where we could have let's say Clojure script In a text file and have the startup time not be completely miserable and have it handle things like standard out and centered Centered in right I mean it's possible that we could do that and have that be you know a Reasonable way of doing quick closure programming so I mentioned a little bit about performance a lot of the promise of jigsaw has to do with performance and You know one of the things that I've learned in my travels is that Especially with the JVM. It's really important to measure the impact and performance as opposed to just rely on your assumptions The JVM is really a remarkable piece of machinery and does some very very clever optimizations It's very difficult to predict how it will behave without actually trying it And so one of the things that I think this drives me. I interest in and I'm just mentioning this is into Performance analysis tools to help measure the impact of these different changes So and this is another sort of take on Stefanos. I think call for more automation There are like these four different kinds of things that we would want and I haven't actually looked through the archive to see how much of this Would be useful and especially in Java, but you know We need a benchmark harness that actually runs benchmarks collect statistics and so on obviously benchmarks themselves that Hopefully represent a workload that is that is meaningful It's actually very difficult to write a benchmark for the Java platform that does what you think it does because the JVM is doing so much optimization That you think that you write a loop inside a loop inside a loop and actually the JVM unrolls the whole thing and declares a dead It doesn't have to execute anything So benchmarks are important then once we get the data aggregating it storing it in a database of some form is Important and figuring out a way to share it and then also visualization obviously comparing the things that are comparable and Being able to draw meaningful conclusions from statistics is is really important one of the things that we did at Sun was leveraged a Pretty high discipline of statistics And specifically the students t-test before we would actually make a determination that some code change had a meaningful performance impact So what's next or you know, this is you know as they used to say in shot of Jack just the beginning of the conversation so we could consider Jigsaw is part of our Java policy discussions I think it's it's worth thinking of the pros and cons of what it would mean and in the large kind of what it what it might Mean to support Open JDK 7 even though upstream hasn't formally released Open JDK 7 yet and I have some links here for the jigsaw project and also The recent JVM language summit that has some really good slides from a notable a Java to engineers throughout the industry that you know I think you'd be interested in to see the kind of work that's going on In upstream so with that are there any questions? so on the the j-package stuff that you'd mentioned earlier the I'm I I would tend to shy away from those sorts of tools Mostly because they have a tendency to reinvent a bunch of things that are in Debian But they usually be if upstream is doing it they do it in a fairly static way Unfortunately, a lot of upstreams have a lot of experience with RPM packaging where the RPM most for the most part RPM packages And how they're done mostly don't change they haven't really changed that substantially in quite some time So they they treated as something where okay, so I generated an RPM RPM installs I'm good and I move on to the next project and look at something else Debian packages actually change a lot and so anything that's not using something like Deb Helper At the bottom level to do the actual package assembly has a tendency to break when policy changes and I don't know how they put all that together But for example the the bit there where they're using Sudo d package dash I to kind of to build an environment. They're sort of reinventing that was just to do That was just to do a particular Demonstration, but it's the kind of thing that you You would not want to just start that script and let it rep because it'd be very uncomfortable with that Yeah, I mean if we can encourage them to You know what what helps a lot is if if they if we can try to sort of work with them to provide You know here's a Debian directory and then we can patch that Debian directory They've got a Debian directory that they can sort of run Debian rules build on and then but we can contribute back You know here's the changes you need for the next version of policy for the next thing that's changed I actually think that they would really welcome these kinds of proposals You know just say you know gently that you know your version string actually does matter You know we we can't have underscores in it and Also the you're absolutely right I mean absolutely you know because Debian policy is going to evolve and one of the things I want to call your attention here is that they have They have a lot of module names that are of the variety JDK base or JDK boot or you know those sorts of things And then that becomes the lead part of the Debian package name using the J package tool Well, we probably don't want to do that I'm guessing we might want to prefix this with something like jigsaw dash seven dash module or you know something like that Right or you know look maybe looking at X the way X org does it is a good inspiration for How to how to handle it? I wonder what happens During the Debian creation, I think most of this metadata is just written into the job manifest or what does the tools do You mean you're talking about the I can probably can use jigsaw without Debian So it Spreads the data somewhere into the job. Yeah So so it becomes the module dash info Java turns into a module info class and that just becomes part of the jar And then but but it but it's a good point because because Obviously the class loader in the VM have to be smart to know that to know that they're dealing with a jigsaw module system And to read that class and then to you know behave appropriately Okay, so what do people think does it? Do you do you like the idea of getting some of the new JDK seven features including modularity or is it biting off way too much? Hell yeah, I Mean I was hearing what you were mentioning that the JDK seven is a little bit in the limbo that sounds a little scary Well, it is a little scary But you know, I think that I Wish we could get I wish we could get Oracle to make a definitive statement about you know You know, this is what we're gonna do and this is when we're gonna do it But in a lot of ways because of the Java community process, they can't unilaterally make that decision anyway So they could express their intent of well, we plan to go to the JCP and propose a platform 7 JSR But I actually wouldn't expect them to make that kind of declaration either So we kind of have to view this as a little bit of a risky you know upstream trunk that is a moving target and as I mentioned there are some if we go down this path there are some subtleties like the way that The jigsaw VM resolves Dependencies versus the way d-package does and we'll have to we'll probably end up tripping over some weird bugs as a result of that But there might be some really interesting upside in in doing it too. So might be worth giving it a shot One of the one of the things that I was speaking the other day with Matias about the issue that you bring up Pablo which is all the different architectures and and so on and one of the challenges that we have is that the Hotspot compiler doesn't build on some of the some of the minor architectures And so, you know, one of the questions is is it good enough to have a jet on those architectures? You know, how violently would people complain as opposed to using GCJ? That's one of the one of the questions that we'll have to ask As someone who knows very little about Java because all the disconnects that we've been talking about and you just sort of go I can't be bothered. I'll disinstall it again This description makes it sound very tempting Because you can just install a little bit of it and I if we were to package the version 7 stuff What do you think the chances in 10 years time that Debian will be upstream for Java? Well, I think it's a really interesting question and you don't even have to qualify it with the 10 years time because the The challenge is that the other operating systems simply can't Do what Debian does very easily Especially especially windows So if we figure out how to crack this nut and answer all the issues that everybody brought up today Matthew and Torsten and Pablo and Nielsen We figure out a way of solving these basic issues and then we can do the modularity right in a clean way We will absolutely be the upstream Because Yeah, I just Well really say plus one I recently changed jobs and I have to work with some CLR nuts And they give me all kinds of grief about Java is completely stagnant It's falling behind it. I mean during your presentation here. I'm thinking wow, you know, we get this into experimental We may actually start attracting Developers just to Debian just the distribution itself because we have it and no one else does Right. Just imagine if we actually get closure to work with fork join and tail recursion on you know God knows a 64-way system and it totally rocks over, you know, what you get out of the box That might cause people to say wow, what is this Debian thing? I think I want that Yeah, and then just a question I guess maybe for the for you in the room at large then this what what kind of risks do we see? I mean, I understand we'd be building off the upstream Trunk it's not actually really released yet Would we be perceived perhaps as the group that you know, if they change direction radically then They see it that Debian waffled on this whole thing or I just curious that I don't know I think that there's a much more practical concern Which is that this is really complicated stuff and I don't want to minimize the fact that There are changes in the VM and the class order and the files and all this and I I don't claim to understand it I mean, I know some of the engineers that that work at Oracle that are super smart that has spent a long time working on this and The the risk that we run especially if we become the upstream is that then we need to maintain Kind of the inner inner workings of it, which is a pretty tall order You know and me, you know, so I think it's I think it's it's tempting, but it would be a huge challenge, too I mean the reward that I see is one of the things that we five have to fight all the time is people who don't feel like Debbie is a viable platform for doing, you know, heavy Java development I think that's something that we've had out there for a while because of the Sun Java not being in the archive for a while and So and just that perception that's built up and this I mean the reward that I see here is we could reverse that overnight I mean if if Debian is the one that embraces what becomes open JDK 7 and really understands how to do the packaging properly and Solves the dependency problem, which is I mean, there's a bit of a fight You have to convince a lot of Java developers that they have a dependency problem because they ship more files But I think that if you can convince them that of that and kind of point and having a working system That it really does it right is a great way of showing what you can do when you've got a full function dependency system that we could It could leapfrog basically I mean it's a lot of work and that's the question is can we find the people who can do this stuff and get them to work in Debian well And maybe if we can take what Nielsen and Matthew were talking about of automating things and building more into Java helper, you know maybe we can reduce our cost of Bringing stuff into the correct level of dependency stuff and really show that you know It's a best practice kind of environment and and get to that that level you're talking about I know at Stanford we're facing we've got a bunch of five applications in Java We're taking over from another group and we're looking at you know Basically a bunch of war files and you know 47 copies of one particular internal Stanford jar and you know 20 different versions And you know this is what the package manager solves for you And if you can introduce that concept into the Java community and show them how it works I mean that would be huge and I love Java's it's I've talked to so many people who say I love Java's a language Java's a great language the deployment mechanism from a system administration perspective is horrible and I you know Because it doesn't work with that kind of level of tool and you have these war files over the place They're opaque and then you get a security vulnerability in one of your dependency jars and And this could resolve to me the biggest issue that everyone faces with Java Well, and you're sitting at Stanford and you look at this 47 different copies of the same thing and you're saying There's a better way exactly yeah, and you know and this is stuff that's already using Maven to do to do builds and It's just if we can hook into that system and then sort of get closer into the way Java developers think about this stuff I mean one of the things that was huge I that happened recently is having eclipse in Debian in Debian unstable you install it and it works I mean wow that was great and You know the more steps we can take down that path I really do think we have a huge opportunity here to pull a bunch of mind share Because you know if you look at the stuff that's out on the web Or they try to analyze you know who's who what people what are people writing code in you know What what's the most popular language is what do people talk about what where they people writing books? Java's Way up there at the top if not at the top almost all the time. It's become sort of the You know I don't take this wrong But it's become sort of the the Fortran of web programming in the sense that everybody keeps claiming that it's dying or going away And yet if you look at the actual install base of the code it is what everyone uses we could have talked about it It's the cobalt you know which is a little bit more derogatory similar sort of idea I've come from a more scientific background than a business processing background, but yeah you pick your analogy I actually you know all admit. I really don't like the job of programming language But I I have come to appreciate the power of the JVM and what it can do on a multi-threaded You know kind of environment and how much work has gone into performance tune that thing and you know I might want to do my high-level programming and something like closure But that is going to be based on a really powerful foundation and you know I challenge you to find something better than the JVM to do that And you know and even even you know one of the things one of the comments that came out earlier was one I just use GCJ instead of MVM. Well, you know in a number of cases we were seeing and you know some of this data Is getting old now that dynamically optimized Java outperformed statically compiled Java because of all the clever optimizations that are going on you pay a little bit of a penalty up Front to warm up the hotspot, you know Compiler, but then you get those those that you know that additional benefit back And the other thing you know which is interesting you hear you'll hear Keith and Bdale talking about is you know If you want to do a cross-platform GUI You know Java makes that pretty easy Well, the other thing that is you know the huge issue everybody's talking about right now too is mobile app development And well some of the mobile platforms are pushing people away from Java Some of them are embracing it as the language to do mobile app development And if you can prototype on Debian and deploy on to a mobile device That's a really appealing story to tell people about why they should use Debian why Debian is interesting right? And so for example, what if there were you know, maybe as a result of the Lenaro project some really nifty very powerful hand-helds that could run Debian natively and let's say the module system and you know have a very Powerful result and very low footprint. I mean that'd be pretty cool You had a question You mentioned the long or extended JCP process and I wonder if I'm talking more about the engineering side And has that given the Seven line a little more chance to mature So I wonder what your opinion is on the status of the completeness and our stability of seven That's a great question and I was trying to answer that question for myself in preparing this talk and I was looking at the The page on open JDK about all the features in JDK 7 and they list some of the things that got Descoped and that aren't going to be part of it at the bottom, but for the things that are in flight You really don't get a sense for how mature they are I think it's very difficult to know really what the answer that question is so What I can say is that that that son, you know I presume Oracle now it has had a very very highly disciplined and methodical release process and As they get close to a release they're very thorough about bug triaging and Because there isn't an eminent release. I'm sure that that process hasn't happened yet Which would cause features to either get solidified or ejected so That's a little bit of the uncharted territory that would be going into One of the one of the sites that would be interesting to reach out to about this is Google Because they have extremely heavy Java use inside inside Google and they're also extremely heavy Ubuntu shop So there's I think there's a lot of potential there It's you know to contact some of the devian developers inside Ubuntu some of the devian developers inside Google and ask them if You know sort of start circling the idea inside Google and see if Google is interested in you know in some of these features And if they might be able to volunteer some time of the of Debian folks inside inside Google or an Ubuntu folks inside Google to help make some of the stuff happen. Oh Well, if I was playing devil's advocate, you know, maybe if I was Google, I would look to you and say well we've already got the Dolphic VM and Your idea is really nice, but you know show us the working code. I You know, I don't want to poo poo that idea. I think you're absolutely right and and you know to the point about You know large-scale distributed processing. I mean who else is doing that kind of scale of Processing and if they really are using it internally then You'd think that that even even so it's not the mobile device that they might be very interested in it Well, it's true that a lot of the senior Sun engineers would eventually go to Google I know many many of them did so It's it's it's an interesting thought and Yeah, it's a good idea I had a conversation with a friend of mine at Google a while ago Who was telling me how much work Google was putting into making GCC better and I asked him why? Just sort of on a business sense. Why are they doing that and he said to save electricity? Because their operational costs right now the amortized cost of a machine per year is about equal to the cost of electricity For that machine per year and so that just kind of got me thinking in general about you know, if there are ways that Kind of an innovative business case can be made for some of the stuff too. I don't know just throw something out canonical You know is there's some economic argument that could be made for that If people have ideas regarding that business case frame of mind That might be a little bit weird sounding at first like like the electricity thing Well, it's not I mean I'm actually you know one of my other passions is around smart energy in the smart grid And I think that we could do a lot with free software to save the planet So I think there's there's a really great there's a really great tie-in there But from a just I hear today practical business point of view Yeah, if you do if you can take some performance optimizations out of running our application You could save potentially a lot of electricity a lot of heat And ultimately a lot of money by doing those things Yep, okay Let's thank the speaker


here is Billy space for Stanis last to turn into an again space down the right for Bournemouth Brooks laid it off to Stacey across and in some storage puts the championship side ahead his fifth goal of the season and with Solanki out injured and Shane long cup tide he takes his chance it's a very tight one in terms of offside but is he just level with the ball there VAR will have a look and storage kept his cool the third Bournemouth corner in quick succession can they make this one count and it's a brilliant save by Bailey Peacock Farrell billing then goes down and again referee Darren England waves away the protests off he goes Jimmy Dunn look by Carter because snap shot by Peter and over by Ron water chance all this is so much better from Burnley come straight back at Burnley though he was billing just backs it almost into storage penalty penalty to Bournemouth and this could be curtains for Burnley well they pushed forward when they can Bournemouth lovely bit of improvisation from billing and the challenge on storage from long leads to the spot kick Stanis last for Bournemouth and surely that is Bournemouth through to the last side of the FA Cup and things just get better and better for caretaker manager Jonathan Woodgate