Slashdot Mirror
The Evolution of Linux
Taiko writes: "Kerneltrap.org has posted some of the more interesting messages from a recent kernel mailing list discussion. It started with a post on proper indentation, but turned into something a bit more. There are some posts by Linus and Alan Cox about the nature of design, computer science, Linux development, evolution, and more. Quite interesting and funny."
The role of Linux in the history of computer science will turn out to be that Linux kept the Open Source model _open_ on the inevitable pathway to Technological Singularity.
Take for example the latest hot Linux gadget, the Sharp SL-5000D Zaurus PDA for Developers which runs both Linux and Java, and is therefore an appealing platform for the further development of Mind.JAVA Artificial Intelligence in the Linux environment -- everyman's last great hope of avoiding a catastrophic Microsoft take-over of the 'Net.
The world owes a lot to Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Tim Berners-Lee and the countless other heroes of the Open Source futurity either posting here on SlashDot or toiling messianically away in obscurity.
Will use Outlook only -- "Prayer will defend us from viruses", says school principal.
This will not do good for the acceptance of Linux in the Bible Belt -- Linux evolved through natural selection, while Windows was created by God.
s/Sn/Sun.
rrr.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I enjoy reading Linus' thoughts so much.
All around him, people try to make him or Linux more than it really is - and invariably, Linus brings it down a notch and puts it in perspective
It's amazing that this guy gets constantly hero-worshiped, his baby created billion dollars of wealth (at one point, at least), and yet just keeps his feet firmly planted
Compare that to the clowns that get high and mighty because they rUleZ at Quake, or on some IRC channel ... The geek community could learn a LOT from trying to emulate Linus' behaviour.
In all seriousness, would this article have been given a second glance if Linus wasn't involved? If I were to post a message saying "Hey, my friends and I were discussing the meaning of life after arguing about pencils, check out the log," I doubt a single editor on slashdot would have given it a 2nd glance. What kind of sick twist on celebrity worship is this?
Can anyone really say that computing as a field or science was designed? What we have today is the result of a form of evolution and a result of a market economy. Nobody knew where we were going, we just started going someplace.
The company I work for has spent the past 4 years slowly evolving a fairly complex graphics and haptic (see: Intelligent Scalpels Through Touch Technology for more about haptics) API. At the start we had only a vague idea of what it should be like. We knew from our experiences in graphics that it should be scene-graph based -- so we borrowed the VRML design. We knew that we wanted to be able to do a few things with it. This gave us the basic framework to start with, much like Linus had with Linux.
Then we basically evolved the product. Every time we worked on a project that used the API, we learnt more about what it was good at and what it lacked. We modified it, fixed things, extended it with new features. After 4 years we have something far better than we could ever have dreamed of designing.
The most important reason for using this approach was not because we believed in an evolutionary approach to software engineering (I don't think that Linus' advice should be taken too literally). It was because we were dealing with making an API out of cutting-edge research - much of which hadn't been done when we started. We simply couldn't have designed it.
Following that thread, can I now propose Linus' Law:
Any software system with a large enough user base can rely on the accumulated experience of its users to add features, and also picking ideas from smaller systems now and then (at a very low incremental effort).
Corollary. The onus is on the smaller players to come up with new features to distinguish themselves from the masses -- but ultimately it's no-win for them because their *really useful* ideas will be subsumed into more popular systems anyway
I need sleep and I'm quite possibly not thinking straight, but am I right in thinking this would create enormous pressures for specialized players like Sun and Apple (and Be, as they found out) in the long term?
If that is the case, where does that leave the "small is beautiful" rule? Does it mutate to "small is beautiful, provided you are part of a *big* idea that has incredible amounts of 'traction'"?
don't be silly.
...
WTF do (ex-)linux companies have to do with the quote you posted.
I think this quote has a point.
If we go into comparing, let's say, building bridges and os programming, I think we _can_ see the differences in methodologies one needs.
With bridges, we have a well known and accepted theory of their statics, a relativly narrow expectation what we expect a bridge to do, and we can, by using tolerances of a wide margin, account for the fact that something unexpected happens.
In an os, there is not really a broadly accepted theory (micro- vs macro-kernel, VM, filesystems, implemetation language) - at least when we look how different realisations we see in practice.
What do we expect am OS to do, or more precisly, what do we expect an OS to do well?
latency vs throughput, single vs massivly multi cpu, graphics in kernel vs graphics in userspace
Seems we have no real consensus here.
At last, and this is perhaps the most important factor - we can't make an OS more failsafe (or performing better) by introducing margins anywhere. Due to the binary nature of CS it doesn't make sense to use redundancy for many aspects of an OS.
It either works or fails.
"Survival" is a very clear term in biology, it means
being able to keep yourself alive.
What does survival mean in software terms? Does
it mean that you make the most money (Microsoft?),
that you get to have the most users?, that you
endure in time and get written in textbooks?,
that you show clear technical superiority?
I think that any of these can be taken as
proof of "survival" of a software project, yet
the fact that MS-DOS lasted extremely long and
became extremely popular cannot possibly
mean that it is something we want to copy or
admire.
An argument that I would happily accept is that
evolution exists in linux-world as the result
of survival of different linux
ideas/implementations (e.g. new VM, new
low-latency etc) in the linux user subspace.
Now, the linux users space is a group of
technically aware people (?!) and evolution
of different linux variants in that space
can be said to be constructive in a technical
sense, thus producing real progress.
This process cannot universally guarantee
software quality (from a purely technical
standpoint)
P.
1- Get latest kernel source 2- Open a random file, go to a random location in that file 3- Roll a d100, use this table: 0-10 insert a random C keyword 11-20 delete nearest statement 21-50 define a new variable 51-80 delete a variable declaration 81-85 change your keyboard layout to some language, switch off monitor and start typing headlines of slashdot. Stop when you feel like it 86-90 delete rand(20) characters 91 delete file 92 merge file with other random 93 copy file with a new name 94 move file to another location 95+ merge file with a random C source from net 4- try building source. If all goes well,submit a patch. Otherwise roll d6, on 1-5 return to step 2, on a 6 return to step 1.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Science provides the tools that engineers use to build stuff.
Science provides a lot of dandy tools. Engineers like tools.
Engineers would be useless without science to provide new raw materials.
Baloney. We (engineers) were building all sorts of impressive stuff long before the invention of science. Check out the Great Pyramid and Yu the Great.
According to Rik:
Biological selection does nothing except removing the weak ones, it cannot automatically create systems which work well.
In short, I believe the biological selection is just that, selection. The creation of stuff will need some direction.
And I have to nod vigorously to that. Even taking the model of accelerated evolution through human breeding of species: you direct two animals together to breed. You don't just let the Ps, the F1s, the F2s, etc. just all wander around in a pen, have a sniper sitting on a post shooting the ones you don't want, and hoping the rest go at it...
The people claiming evolution to be a process to slow for software development seems to miss out on an important point. Measurement of evolution speed cannot be carried out in years. Evolution must be measured in lifecycles. The number of lifecycles needed for a program/snippet to evolve is about 1-20 lifecycles (releases) and by multiplying this with the time it takes for one lifecycle to complete you've got an approximat value of how fast computer programs evolve.
Another important point is that in this evolution - tough on som level about "survival of the fittest" - there is a certain level of continious "trial and error". This is in fact the way most programming - and learning - is done and this is done through the lifecycle. In real life, DNA can't remember actions carried on by their owners.
Look a monkey!
Reading it, does anybody else get a strong sense of deja vu? It sounds like the two sides are arguing Evolution vs. Creationism -- well, they *are* -- but in this case they're arguing it over Linux instead of over human beings. Only in this case, we *know* there was a creator, and he says "I didn't create it, it evolved". Which makes me wonder if we ever did find the "creator" of human beings, and what would happen if he/she/it/they said the same thing about us :-) Picture it (and pardon my Eurocentricity):
Us: "God! At last we have found you! Now tell us, please... WHY ARE WE THE WAY WE ARE? WHY ARE WE HERE?"
God: "I dunno. I created you to eat the lions, and you just kinda got out of hand"
Don't take it too hard, Larry. Stay with us!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
bollocks, no way this is insightful!!!
you don't understand the concepts of evolutiuon, and neither does mr. van riel.
biological selection (actually, the terminology is "natural selection") does not work by weeding out the weak ones. natural selection favours the multiplication of successfull ones (ie 'survival of the fittest').
the argument you (and rik van riel) are using, is essentially the same as most creationists use: mutation can only break down and not build up.
this is wrong. read some darwin before you comment on this stuff please.
regards,
meneer de koekepeer
Yes, that would be the problem. But it would be wonderful for implementing specific subsystems. Say you wanted to build the fastest web server, being defined as being able to serve the most documents of random size between 1 byte and, say, 2 megabytes, within a given amount of time. Build a farm of a few hundred webservers with a few thousand client boxes, and let the genetic algos go wild.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
- From: Rik van Riel
Since Linus is comparing biological selection to the way things work in Linux, these are ironic words coming from Rik.Subject: Re: Coding style - a non-issue
[...]
Biological selection does nothing except removing the weak ones, it cannot automatically create systems which work well.
[...]
The strength and robustness of the linux system lies in the very fact that it _doesn't_ need to have a few huge money-making orginizations being the primary proponents. That linux is free and community supported and is STILL able to reach 40% of the server market is astonishing.
That Sun manages to make oodles of cash with high margin offerings and is still losing market share is a sign of its maturation and specialization. If you look at teh R&D effort within sun I would bet you that 90% of it is directed towards enterprise level scalability and not common desktop or workstation workloads. Recent comparisons have suggested that Solaris is severely trailing linux in terms of single/dual processor performance. I can imagine this margin only getting larger in the coming years.
Oh well...
the problem with that witty finsk is that he appaprently was forced to endure a few real bad CS classes back in Helsinki.
He's wrong, of course. Whatever works in Linux works because at some point somebody did some serious thinking before starting to spew out code. Planning data structures. Maybe even read about how others tackled the problem.
Thats called Design. In a few areas Linux serously lacks design. and it shows.
f.
OK, linux is evolving (=changing incrementally) and not controlling tightly how it evolves is a nice idea, but this is how far the analogy goes. Linus is taking the analogy too far and use biological evolution out of its context. People do design pieces of code they submit, linus do control which ones are released in the main tree. Both of these facts, especially the latter one, make evolution of linux fundementally different than natural evolution. If you agree with linus please carefully state what do you agree with. Do you agree that any complicated engineering project can not be designed in advance? Or the fact that linux is not particularly directed to a defined goal is a good thing? Or natural evolution is a proof that not designing linux is a good idea? I agree with first two, but third one is plain wrong.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Bridge building has also had tens of thousands of years of trial and error which surely helps. Another thing is competition: There's none in bridge building AFTER you've got the contract. Nobody is going to build another bridge next to it to see if they can make a better one.
> The strength and robustness of the linux system
This linux system that depending on which "stable" version you download, locks up under high load, corrupts your filesystem when umounting it, invisibly reverts your filesystem to one that can be hosed from a power fail, or kills off processes at random -- like init -- when it starts running out of memory... And that's just what I recall off the top of my head from the last few months.
I don't think Linux is exactly a pile of shit either, but let's not kid ourselves, it's got the same problems that commercial OS's deal with, and the development model hasn't exactly been a panacea in that respect.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
When discussing the need for proper 'scientific' design, Alan Cox said:
"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
To me, this seems to be a very poor analogy. The fact is that before the widespread use of maths and materials science in structual engineering ('building a good wall'), structual engineering didn't really exist at all - there were just builders and designers. 'Engineering' only really began when the science was added; before it was an art or trade. As for building a 'perfectly good wall', yes, the walls did indeed usually stand up; but:
a) Not always. Take the case of medaeval cathedrals. In order to stop the weight of the roof pushing the walls apart, the walls had flying buttresses built for support; however in some cases the buttresses actually were so big that they collapsed the wall in the other direction!
b) Not very efficiently. Due to the builders being unable to optimise their design, buildings were often very wasteful of materials in design.
c) How many medaeval skyscrapers were there? You just can't build many of todays huge structures without 'sciencey' engineering.
All in all, I think Alan would have been better advised not to compare it to building a wall; the problem is more that an operating system has such wide scope and enormous complexity (due to different areas of code affecting each other), as well as being flexible enough to change over time, that it isn't feasible to desgin the whole system as you would a dam or skyscraper.
Chris Cunningham
Ahh your method of using linux (that you assume is the most widely deployed) is utter bunk. It totally _bypasses_ the excellent community support in the community by using _untested_ recently released software.
The proper way to use linux, to deploy it, is to make sure that community support verifies the stability of kernel. Redhat's kernel is usually very well tested and will not crash under high loads. 2.4.16 will not crash under high loads. If you use an arbitrary kernel release from Linus then you bypass the one of the critical features of linux -- Community support.
You're comparing QWERTY to a totally different designed optimal keyboard layout. If you want to replace QWERTY, you have to evolve it slowly towards what users want. Users don't want a totally redesigned layout but they sure like small changes.
Just how many new SIGs are going to come from this one thread?
-Spackler
I'm not claiming to be deep, I'm claiming to do it for fun. -Linus
This linux system that depending on which "stable" version you download, locks up under high load, corrupts your filesystem when umounting it, invisibly reverts your filesystem to one that can be hosed from a power fail, or kills off processes at random -- like init -- when it starts running out of memory... And that's just what I recall off the top of my head from the last few months.
Funny how none of that stuff has happened to me (2.4.13). The umount bug (iput) was just plain dumb - detected immediately, fixed within the day. Now, I think you're being just plain childish about the ext3 fstab issue, this is just a usability issue that is being addressed. All in all, sounds like bleating to me.
If you're worried about stability, use the kernel that comes with your distro. The rest of us would probably prefer to take our chances, just so we can keep flying at the front of the flock.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The success of a project is not the sum of design plus evolution, where enough of one can make up for too little of the other. It's more like the product of design multiplied by evolution: if either is too small, your project goes nowhere fast.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Sounds like a couple of harsh extremes to me.
Of course software is designed. But this does not mean that the design is complete, correct, or optimal. And that's where evolution comes in.
All these people who scoff at formal design do have a point: so many times so called formal designs end up being one way paths to the wrong thing.
The formal design advocates repond by saying, "well, you didn't have a correct design." A fat lot of good that does. I've been part of development teams where there is this mantra of design it, check it, double check it, lets not do anything until the design is complete, because failure is uncorrectable. And you end up progressing e v e r s o s l o w l y. This is design by perfection -- the idea is to be so careful about the design that it can't be flawed.
Of course, this never works. Nobody can make anything non-trivial right the first time around. It requires some kind of step-wise refinement. Now, this does not mean the design should be abandoned, but one should design in anticipation of making mistakes. Then, the design permits the local correction of errors, without them becoming a global fiasco.
Design for flexibility then: separate APIs from implementations. Version your APIs so when they're lacking you can produce a new back-compatible version. Don't know all the details about every possible kind of device? Gee, throw in an open-ended IOCTL into the device control API. Refine IOCTLs for similar devices later, when we figure out what they need besides the basics.
The point is that it is possible to design adaptable and refinable systems in order to accomodate the inevitable "opps" with a fix that is local and not global in nature. Now, you can't be flexible in everything and sometimes correcting things hurts: witness the Linux VM. It wasn't really planned to abstract it's API away to allow for interchangable plug-ins, was it. And the VM wars were somewhat painful precisely because one had to chose and couldn't punt.
Nevertheless, experienced software designers try to provide an "out" whenever they can, and think that a particular course might require modification in the future.
You could've hired me.
and on the other hand, a horse cannot evolve wheels, because the intermediate steps between a legged horse and a wheeled horse would not be able to move. pity because a wheeled horse could be faster...
just look at biological species to see that a process of evolution rarely results in the optimal design, and is unable to take U-turns or back out of dead ends...
The whole thread makes me ill. Many projects are designed up front -- the basic feature set, the UI, the object interfaces. It's a shame they did not put more emphasis on this reality.
[Linus]
> Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has
> nothing to do with their engineering practices
> or their coding style.
It may have everthing to do with evolution, but only because the baby is growing up, and the engineers have little or nothing new to toss out of the womb.
Sun made middleware happen; now MS is cloning it and taking their one big chance. Less evolution and more population.
Sun and SGI could have made small fairly inexpensive game cubes years ago -- cubes that could have doubled as engineering workstations or even clustered. They chose not to, going for the server market. Neither has seriously approached the asian manufacturing giants. Poor thought processes up front!
IMHO, of all the Unix giants, Irix and SGI had the best chance to make it big -- Irix, for all it's flaws, did the best job ever of hiding Unix, and they did it many years ago. Too bad they dropped the ball and failed to make a consumer device with the help of asia.
MS rises, and continues to rise. It may be evolution in the end, but it's the overwhelming size of their population, not the superiority of product.
Add in the failure of the USA to enforce it's laws, add in the poor strategies of the big iron Unix corps, and there you have it. Little evolution, since their was never a competitive population.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
what does survival mean in software???
--exactly what it means in biology. things that survive from a biological point of view are necessarily good or better. sometimes they are. sometimes they're not. humans survived because they were able to overcome certain hardships created by the world. But i dont exactly admire humans; if you read Ishmael by good old mr. Quinn, he clearly (as do I) dislike human nature, despite the fact that we can't avoid it. humans do the exact same thing that microsoft does: they kill everything around them, and take more than they need.
There was one thing that Bill Gates did not foresee: the advent of a FREE os...something that he could not counter. the human race (analogous to M$) has killed everything, and eventually there will come a species that can not be killed off (in my opinion this will be the sentiet AI that I, err...i mean people will create). However, until there comes along something analogous to linux, humans will continue to dominate.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
If you want to see a system that was more thoroughly _designed_, you
should probably point not to Dennis and Ken, but to systems like L4 and
Plan-9, and people like Jochen Liedtk and Rob Pike.
And notice how they aren't all that popular or well known? "Design" is
like a religion - too much of it makes you inflexibly and unpopular.
I hardly think that plan9's unpopularity is down to that fact that's it's been well designed!
working in it is a joy. It suffers from lack of a good web browser (not exactly a small undertaking) and 23 char filenames (wave bye bye to those ream soon now [tm])
but I guess not everyone likes design. I'm sure more ppl reading this are in an untidy hell hole of a room. If you've not got some dirty crockery in reaching distance of you then I doff my hat to you.
but good design brings pleasure, and working with plan9 brings more joy than frustration.
linux is winning not because it's a great piece of software but rather one of those historical flukes of the right place at the right time and captured people's imagination. Feeding my pc with my first slackware floppy disk set was liberating and discovering the joy of hitting co-operate rather than default has justly brought it's reward.
but hey, come on, keep your mind open. there's always a spare pc lying around, spend an evening with somethign else for a change.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I wonder if Linux would have been the phenomena it is today if Linus had been brought up in evolution-bashing Kansas...
Yes, but he'd be saying "Linux isn't designed, the reason it works is because we have God on our side. We have lots of changes coming from people interested in pulling the project in different directions, including me, but He guides us to accept only the best final outcome. Look at Sun, they're doomed to failure because they try to follow their own narrow path instead of putting faith in the Lord..." etc. etc.
But don't take my word for it.
Just add the support for the advanced hardware features of the E15k and you're ready to go. Get the enterprise level reliability and management features that it needs, and you'll see Solaris floundering on every single bit of Sun's hardware.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
I have tremendous respect for Linux & co. with regards to software development, and it is always nice to see people who are not philosophers (or biologists) discussing philosophy (and biology).
However with respect to their opinions on philosophy (and biology), they are, as a previous poster commented, quite undergraduate. Actually I might be inclined to say worse about them, as I am self educated beyond High School, and I am aware of a much broader world of philosophy (and biology) than they seem to be.
Actually, it reminds me of nothing so much as Alan Cox' posturing on the DMCA, where my opinion was that people who do not understand such issues at all should refrain from making lawyerly or political comments in a broader public form where they have respect that is not meritted for the comments they are making.
While it is nice to see these people expressing interest in broader topics, I feel that they should keep their public discussions to the issues of which they have some understanding, namely software development. All that can come of their ponderings otherwise is to spread their ignorance further than they already have.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
I didn't read the whole thread rant with Linus et. al. - but from my own experience and observation EVERY successful project mixes both initial design and evolution in design AND implementation. If you fix the design absolutely up front at both the macro level AND of every sub-system in a large project, you will invariably run into huge roadblocks at some point. Something will not work as planned. As I see the Linux Bazaar process, it reaps benefits when this happens - some person or organization stumbles into a roadblock with poor networking code, poor SCSI subsystem behavior at high loads, or an unreliable VM. These emergent behaviors may only affect some small portion of the user base - but the subsystems then enter an evolutionary phase where people varyingly fix what's there or design something new, and some design ends up surviving based on what the most people seem to like and want and in the end, if all else fails, what Linus dictates.
So no, this isn't strict "evolution" after the style of Darwin. If we let purely random decisions drive software and forked every few minutes, the analogy would be pretty complete. It would also take as long to write good software as it does to evolve a well adapted creature. An eternity.
I see where the idea of selective breeding comes in - Linus sees himself and the kernel leading guns as picking and choosing the best patches and suggestions. Up to a point, this means they are exercising design and discretion, but they generally don't "assign" work from their central database of TODO tasks to IBM, Red Hat, and other individuals or organizations participating in kernel development - those organizations and individuals scratch their own itches and their work usually finds its way back into the kernel. Other posters accurately said that a more random evolution could be effected by letting people check in free-for-all into CVS. This is true, but I don't think that would necessarily improve the results and timeline of kernel development.
You have to realize that the comparison here is, as others pointed out, to a monolithic software development process - in the Cathedral, a centralized decision is made - "we are going to make Windows NT better able to support large enterprise database deployments" and a team is assigned to break it down and work through all the implications, then implement. In Linux-land, the interested parties don't call to schmooze with MS biz dev people who pass info down to technical guiding councils, they pony up and write their own patches to the subsystems they see that need improvement. If there are enough interest parties, presumably enough patches will get submitted that the best from all get incorporated into the set of relevant subsystems that effect large enterprise database deployment, and we end up with a Linux kernel that supports exactly that. Of course the primary difference is that at the same time, somebody else may have made complementary and/or conflicting changes to make Linux a better desktop OS. Chaos ensues and flames erupt on kernel-dev and wonderously, eventually, something better for everyone results after compromises are made.
In engineering, maintenance is performed for one purpose: to achieve homeostasis. For example, a building is maintained so that it remains standing, etc. With software, maintenance consists of homeostatic things (bug fixes), but also of things to enhance, or change, functionality. You would never add new storeys in the middle of a high-rise building, or modify a jet fighter to carry large amounts of freight. Yet changes like this do occur with software.
And they always will occur. Or at least they should: software that is not receiving change requests is software that is dying. Be glad for those requests. And don't complain when users change their minds, or don't really know what they want. Users are people. In geek-speak, this means that they are not reprogrammable: you must deal with them as they are.
When developers really accept this, they tend to accept that the correct paradigm really is evolution. I dream that more advocates of the engineering approach to software will someday be among those people.
I was about to give him a really witty answer but the power blinked, and that was that. Too bad I didn't bother to record the co-ordinates :-(
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I agree with Linus.. projects that I've spent several years on came out at the end with features and design elements I could never have predicted going in. I've spent 6 months doing design work on pen and paper at the start of a project, and during the years of implementation thereafter, far more 'design' was done by reacting to the state of the code in any given moment and the problems it was having both internally and with regard to the userbase. My biggest project has evolved tremendously, even though I was essentially the only coder working on it for most of its existence. I can't imagine, then, how much less 'designed' by any individual the linux kernel must be, with the hundreds or thousands of developers contributing to it.
On the topic of Sun's doom, I understand why he says that. Sun's software is co-evolved with their hardware, but neither change very quickly. Linux has to cope with a much more wild, much more genetically diverse hardware base, and as a result it tends to move faster to support new types of devices. Solaris on Intel is a joke compare with Linux on Intel in terms of its hardware support.
Of course, there is nothing magical about a process that allows more evolutionary freedom.. if the hackers working on it don't have the good sense to be effective natural selectors and mutators, then the process won't have a terrific outcome. Linux is thriving because it has so darn many hackers working on it, and because it has so very, very many users using it, and because Linus has a deep and proper understanding of both good taste and evolution.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Why do so many people read Linus comments and try to simplify them further missing the point completely? Obviously When Linus says that the Kernel evolves through "sheer luck", he is not trying to say that the changes made to Linux were not intentional. Each individual believes his change is good and necessary, and many are... Linux and his support staff, like Alan, are there to audit the changes and ensure that the ones that matter get in. In the end, however, each change is not what moves Linux forward at the pace it does, it's the fact that moving all of the bits around finds "lucky" combinations that create sparks of genius which create new intentional changes that make some of those earlier changes, that at the time seemed like the most important, to become irrelevant in the light of the newest revelation.
But that was all I could take. Still, a rather good philisophical discussion on software evolution. Now time to think of other things... hehehe
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Individuals are great for design -- particularly if they have some other individuals with whom they can communicate well for reality checks during design. Consider Seymour Cray's designs -- not very complex by the standards of today's computer systems, but Cray's ability to pick a team and then listen well combined with his individualistic design habits led him to beat IBM's army of well funded PhD. The problem with individuals is that there is a natural limit to the complexity that an individual can fit in his head -- where the internal bandwidths of an individual's mind are enormous enough that engineering tradeoffs can occur at rates vastly exceeding those allowed by the bottlenecks of verbal and/or literate communication.
Similarly, it is a mistake to believe that once a gifted individual's limits are hit that a group of gifted individuals are going to be able to beat a broad evolutionary process in advancing the design.
That's why the gifted individual designer's first and foremost design goal should be to maximize the evolutionary flexibility of his design -- so that the advantages of individualist design are maximally leveraged before complexity dictates that distributed evolution dominates further design.
PS: As for Torvalds' understanding of evolution and breeding -- he underestimates the importance of niches. It is precisely the ability to fill niches that makes an evolutionary system viable. Consider, for instance, sexual reproduction's tendency to, upon encountering the periphery of ecological ranges where population is sparse (like, ahem, Finland) automatically inbreed and therefore express mutations -- most of which fail, of course. The point is that without expressing those mutations the advantages of new genetic patterns can't translate into population increases at those peripheral ranges. Linux isn't a good example of this, since UNIX was a well-populated "ecological range", so Linus should take care not to generalize too far his insights derived therefrom.
Seastead this.
Sounds like Linus is in accord with Dick Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay, or rather the "New Jersey" school of design. The "worse" package gets out quickly to a place where "natural [user/hacker] selection" can work on it.
You seem pretty clueless to me.
Stability and robustness is measured in the field, not with a bug count on an arbitrary kernel release.
Redhat's kernel is as arbitrary as Linus'.
You own linux as much as Linus does. That means GPL protections for non copyright holders. Linus only has a very small percentage of the kernel copyrighted to himself. So if you felt like forking the kernel you could and no one would be mad at you, except some slashdot trolls. The kernel has been forked countless times for many many reasons, including forking a development branch (2.5 is a fork off 2.4), forking for real-time, forking for embedded developments, forking for MkLinux (linux sitting on top of a microkernel), etc.
So please stop the charade and doom-and-gloom bashing of the linux kernel. It just plainly nonsensical.
I don't think I agree with the full analogy. Obviously Code is not randomly generated or selected for mutation. We use intelligence to know what's wrong, then we use knowledge to improve. What really evolves in good software is the design, not the code. Sometimes you have to start from scratch again to implement design changes.
We could probably design a new, better human, but sheer evolution will _NEVER_ result in perfection. Design can perfect many small peices of code. Combining these smaller pieces, one can achieve near perfection in a lot less time than sheer luck. Evolution produces local minima's, where design can find the absolute minimum error, and move toward it much quicker. (Think if multiple layer perceptron networks.)
Karma Clown
Total bullshit. Linus said it is somewhat directed evolution, but evolution nonetheless which is why Linux has turned into (and continues to) something he had never intended.
Your point 2
Totally ridiculous. Linus made a simple loose analogy, and you are taking it WAY too literally.
Your point 3
WTF? This has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. The fact that MS succeeds through aggressive marketing and business tactics has nothing to do with anything, AT ALL, period! How is this relevent to anything at all in the discussion?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Here is my entry [tripod.com]. At 45 mph cross-country I can give the horse a good run for the money, even before I start shooting.
With a giant internal combustion engine and treds (not wheeles). You're using far, far more energy to move that tank then to move that horse.
Now, if you could do it on a mountain bike, you might have a point. But I think The real issue is that speed isn't the only optimizing factor. There are a lot of other things involved as well, and energy efficiency is one of the most important.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah that is pretty trollish. It's ambiguous whether you were implying I fall back on ESR dogma. I will just state that I dont follow any dogma, open source or not. I am just refuting the silly assertions in your posts. Like over-the-top take on linux stability and reliability that bordered on pure FUD.
The orginizational "problem" have you taken a glimpse of really only has to do with the travesty of the Van Riel VM. What a mess that was. If linus had chosen Andrea in 2.3.53 (when andrea and rik were competing) then we wouldn't be anywhere close to the mess we're in now. Shit happens, and linux survives. 2.4.16 is top notch. 2.5 is underway with a very impressive to-do list. I'm expecting great things from this kernel in the future, and so far your harping on a developmental accident hasn't changed my mind in the slightest.
False. The evidence is all around you (and in fact you are part of the evidence).
2 there is no reason for a god to exist
False.
3 based on our conception of logic, a god cannot exist
To the contrary, rationality depends upon the existence of God.
4 we know why, when and how the stories of gods were made up and propagated
This, at least, is partly true. It is true, in that we know that evil men in times past refused to worship the true and living God, and instead fabricated false gods for themselves.
5 we know why and how the stories of gods were accepted and used, and for what purposes
You're repeating yourself.;-)
Far from being "undermined" by belief in God, as the evolutionist fantasizes, rationality is actually dependent upon God. On the other hand, rationality is undermined and utterly demolished by evolution.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I must say, the following quote from Linus from the article is one that strikes me with fear and awe:
When someone with the prestige that Linus has says something as powerful as this, I cannot help but feel that this topic is something that he is absolutely passionate about, much in the same way Stallman is passionate about Free Software. Linus doesn't seem like the type of person to use this sort of phrase on a whim; like he says, "I'm deadly serious".
The challenge is to come to terms with the fact that the bulk of humanity will never see the deep truth in what he is saying.
The mythology of design is pervasive but just plain wrong. Design only ever happens in marginal increments. Quotes about standing on the shoulders of giants come to mind.
A deeper challenge is that most people are incapable of understanding evolution, not because of any lack of inherent intelligence but because they haven't ever gotten out of the comfort zone.
An interesting but neglected mid-80s paper by Marcia Salner, then at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, but now at the University of Illinois at Springfield, as I see following a Google search I now need to spend some time following up on, pointed out that it helps greatly to have got through some genuine crises, firstly to break our naive and seductive faith in the universality of right and wrong answers and secondly to force us to look beyond the naive relativism which first replaces the right-wrong dichotomy.
Evolution, be it biological, social, technical or whatever, is about what works in practice, and even more so about the uses made of its products, because evolution does not happen in a vacuum. (Yes I am using "vacuum" metaphorically. The real vacuum of 3D space is also highly evolved.)
Now I find myself caught up with the even deeper challenge that if too many people actually believed what Linus is saying that the whole system would collapse. It seems only possible to build viable social institutions on rhetoric that does not stand scrutiny.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
When I was in college, I read the book Software Tools in Pascal by Kernighan and Plauger. The most valuable thing I learned in college was the system of design set forth in that book, which the authors called "left-corner design".
The idea is simple: when creating a program, start with the most important thing the program needs to do. Once you have that working, add more features. Ideally, as you go, you should be releasing working versions to whoever will be using your program.
This is so right in so many ways. For one thing, if you run out of time during a project, at least you have something you can release, and it may very well do much of what the users need. (There is a line in the book to the effect of "80% of the problem solved now is better than 100% solved later.") Also, early feedback from the users can show you what's wrong with your design, before you write a whole bunch of code that you would later have had to rip out. (I seem to recall an example in the book where a large system spec turned out to be totally wrong; the users didn't know what they wanted until they had something to play with.)
I never before noticed that the standard open-source development techniques match up with the left-corner methodology. Open-source projects such as Linux are all about "release early and often".
When I read Linus's comments, I was nodding my head all over the place. You create some code that solves some problem, possibly not very well. You release it. Feedback and patches start to arrive, and the code grows, possibly in directions you never foresaw. The more popular the code gets, the more robust it gets, as people patch it to work in a wide variety of situations and on a wide variety of hardware. This is why Linux has come so far, so fast.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
[off-topic] Hey I thought slashdotter were up-to-date. The creationists lost badly in last year's elections, so evolution is back in the syllabus. Actually it was never out, it was a local option and most schools continued to teach evolution.
[back on topic] What a wonderful exchange of ideas! Linus has me convinced. OS/free software is about chaos (as in math). It's about an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards. Sure if you've got a small team and a tight time-frame you'll need to have tight control over the project. But linux is great because of the chaotic (as in math) processes which produce it.
I'm not sure if you're describing the shortcomings of a horse or of evolution. Assuming the latter, I don't think evolution needs to make U-turns because rather than turning it forks. In other words, if species X becomes extinct you can view that as a failure of evolution, but it's not. Because somewhere in the past, species X diverged from species Y.
Only thru _TIGHT_ CONTROL and superior foresight will quality software be written. Without a verbose design, structured development process, perfect testing procedure and most importantly superior direction, software will fail to be of any value to society.
:)
This universe might be based on pure uncertainty (as shown in quantum mechcanics) but we as observers are completely outside of this random system and must structure this randomness into something consistent and predictable thru solid design. If not, progress will be slow and fraught with failures (evolution). Evolution is slow and seeing as we are of the universe, yet outside of it (we can observe), we need not be restricted by it's short comings.
Thru perfect top down control we will write perfect software which is second to none!
On the other hand, maybe function precedes form. Maybe it is better to focus on the task at hand, allowing external events to dictate the direction, then to separate ourselves from the environment we are tending, after all, we create things be _useful_ and not just to be used
Maybe.. just maybe there is a point where control is harmful and hinders progress, maybe.. just maybe.. progress is unavoidable.
-- You can be a geeklord too
and all I can tell is from my G4 Darwin fucking rules!
Linus sounds tired and irratible. I think that the adoption of his idea and the media's desecration of "it's itent" have gotten to Linus to the point that he's comparing hiself to God or Godlike figure who's created a thing that evolves according to natural, hence random, process.
I hope he gets the rest he needs.
Meanwhile go get yourself a Mac this OSX is what I was thinking about when I installed RH5.1 all those years ago ('96?)
This
Evolution makes attempts at U-turns all the time...
Flightless birds dont get their hands back, marine mammals don't get their gills back, we stand up straight, but our spine can't take it, our yes attempt to focus by bending/stretching the lens rather than moving the lens back and forth, etc etc.
Evolution as a method works because it achieves results without requiring a plan or a design.
However if you do have a specific goal set, such as 'we want an application that solves this problem', then a 'try 1000 different angles to throw 999 away isn't very efficient... A proper design might allow you to throw away the 999 redundant ones before work has even begun...
There is always an anonymous coward who will take a metaphor literally, miss the point by a mile and make a complete arse of himself.
You sound pretty paranoid.
Honestly you shouldn't be too worried. The shit _hasn't_ hit the fan, and 2.4.16 is ROCK solid. _Yes_, 2.4 took a long time to stabilize. It's there now, after the Van Riel vm was tossed aside. So lets cut the crap and call a spade a spade: 1) Linus is not a stable release maintainer. If linus puts out a kernel it needs to be tested. Linus does not put out release candidates. Only a fool would use a product that has been released without prior testing. 2) 2.4 took so long to stabilize because of the mistaken beleif that a BSD style VM was best for linux. 2.4 doesn't have the infrastructure to handle it (reverse memory mapping, etc). 3) 2.4.16 is a fucking great kernel. Except for a few possible bugs (the source tree is 149MB uncompressed!) I know of no problems whatsoever. 4) 2.5.x is already starting off with a bang. the new block/io layer should kick major ass, along with all the other enhancements planned. 5) Quit your whining. The sky isn't falling, alan cox isn't retiring to the hills to become a hermit, and linus torvalds knows what the fuck he's doing.
Engineers have to build things to get paid by their customers. If the things work reasonably well and don't fall down, engineers get paid.
Engineers use science when available. If it's not, engineers hack - they base their results on trial and error (BTW, note that most engineering disciplines spent a lot of time analyzing failures).
Sometimes engineers use science that's wrong. Sometimes they get away with it (if large enough safety factors are applied) and sometimes not.
My favorite story comes from the book "Design Paradigms" by Henry Petrosky (sp?). Galileo's formula for the strength of the cantilever beam was wrong. Yet it was used in construction of bridges for few hundred years. Only when the engineers tried to reduce the cost by shaving the safety factors and bridges started to fall down, someone went and looked back at the math and discovered the mistake.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Ahh your method of using linux (that you assume is the most widely deployed) is utter bunk. It totally _bypasses_ the excellent community support in the community by using _untested_ recently released software.
So in short, it's my fault for using Linux, because new releases in the stable branch are not tested. Gotcha. I'm really trying to mend and stop being so glib all the time, but sometimes it's really hard.
Your admonishments to whatever moral character I might lack based on my criticisms, whining, whatever you might want to call it, have absolutely no truck when I have to make a recommendation based on requirements and Linux comes up short. Lemme save every respondent the bother: I am an ungrateful, whining jerk who spurns the community that provides this free software. I have problems none of you seem to have, and I cast aspersions wherever I can because of it. I am in short, a big fink meanie. Get used to it, there's thousands more like me, and they make recommendations too, so you might want to give the Wagging Finger Of Scolding +2 a rest and start listening to what we have to say, no matter how much venom we coat it with.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Great! Now read it in English again, and this time go for understanding. ;-)
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
If you insist upon being serious, your real issue is willful rebellion against God, as manifested in your denial of the truth that you were created by God. Willful rebellion isn't corrected by understanding something correctly; it's corrected by stopping the rebellion.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I misquoted nothing. Did he say it or not? No one is going to pretend -- certainly I am not -- that Gould is not utterly devoted to his evolutionist fideism. So it would be ludicrous to even think that Gould would not attempt to explain away the facts he admits in the quotation. Of course he makes the attempt. Duh.
actually caught - in the fossil record - the critical transitions.
Rubbish. No "transitions" have been caught anywhere. For this to be actually verified, you would have to have a fossil from every generation between parent and "evolved", "transitional" child. You would furthermore have to be able to demonstrate that what you have are actually direct biological descendants, or else Gould's "proof" is nothing but post hoc nonsense.
So what Gould has -- as he actually said -- is inference, and nothing more.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
And I submit to you that design is inherent to evolution.
Evolution, in my view, is a process comprised of two cycling stages, as others have pointed out. Mutation is a random process, as random events cause (perhaps a number of) individuals in a species to develop a new trait. Selection is a process of deciding which "mutants" are able to reproduce and propagate.
In biology, is there decision-making in mutation? Depends on what kind of mutation. If a gamma ray snips a DNA molecule, there's no decision made there - it just happens. But decisions can affect mutation. DNA researchers and biologists create mutants in labs everyday. And as a society, we've accepted a technologically advanced quality of life that we know affects our environment and in turn affects us. What goes around comes around.
Decision making takes a more active role in selection and propagation. In anthropology, we measure evolutionary success generally by the number of viable offspring produced by the variation. That means that a successful variation of a species in a world of scarce resources (such as food and useful time) manages and allocates its resources in such a way that it is able to have more children than other variations of the species and thus have more influence on the future direction of the species. Successful management requires successful decision-making. Just try to manage without making a decision and you'll see. It doesn't matter if radioactive spiders turn whole packs of dogs into super-intelligent beings able to telepathically move fire-hydrants and build solid-gold toilets to drink out of - if those dogs decide to spend their time doing that and never have any puppies, they're an evolutionary dead-end. This is actually an issue that's been discussed in Anthro...people we see as being more more successful in our society are having fewer kids than less successful people...anyhow, we see that decision-making (and thus, design) is not mutually exclusive to evolution and in fact plays a large role in it.
In software, mutation could be described as a change to either the source code of a software "component" or the configuration of a collection of software components. Any such modification is a mutation of software, whether intentional or not. Most changes in software, for good or ill, are intentional. Some are caused by gamma rays hitting storage devices and flipping bits, but more are done on purpose as an act that serves some purpose (bug-killing, optimization, etc.) So there is a decision there to serve the purpose via change. There's also a decision to either let a modification stand (because it serves the purpose, or because reversing the change is not worth it), or to revert to the pre-modification state. The decision is there even if it's only to ignore the issue. Decision making and, by extension, design is present in the selection of software changes. You cannot separate design from software evolution, because you cannot separate the evaluation and decision making process from the software development process. Doing such a thing about amount to putting a million monkeys on a million consoles banging away and hoping Linux 3.0 magically results. Statistically it could happen, but animal control would have a cow.
Linus originally decided to go with Rik's VM code for 2.4, then later switched to Andrea's code. Neither move was decided by a coin toss. Evolution? Yes. Design? Yes. It's both, and why can't it be both?
I'll finish by quoting from "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu (page 4):
-- John Truong
No, IMO the principles are not the same.
;-).
Reviews and audits are also done with bridges, but nobody in their right mind would come to the conclusion that you could abandon margins because of good peer review of the design.
Simply put, in bridge building you have always the *additional* security of safety margins, without waiving the principles of peer review.
OTOH, there you are right, CS has the possibility of easily producing pre-/beta- stuff, something bridge designers can't do to that extend.
But it seems that this isn't enough to make OSs as reliable as bridges
I said:
Rubbish. No "transitions" have been caught anywhere. For this to be actually verified, you would have to have a fossil from every generation between parent and "evolved", "transitional" child. You would furthermore have to be able to demonstrate that what you have are actually direct biological descendants, or else Gould's "proof" is nothing but post hoc nonsense.
So what Gould has -- as he actually said -- is inference, and nothing more.
Do you get it, friend? I am denying that Gould's defense of his admission has any weight whatsoever. He hasn't got any "transitional forms" of anything. He is claiming that he does, but he would have to prove that critter X is a direct lineal descendant of critter Y, or else he is resorting to inference.
And this he cannot do. It's tantamount to lining up a bunch of different breeds of dogs and saying that the Norwegian Elkhound "evolved" from the Chihuahua (in fact, it's worse, since he can at least show that Elkhounds and Chihuahuas are the same species). It's like showing me a gecko and a gila monster and saying that one "evolved" from the other. Okay, fine: prove it. And he can't. He can only make inferences. Inferences ain't proof, pal. This is blatantly fallacious post hoc nonsense. This is fideism of a transcendent order.
The only ones being intellectually dishonest are Gould & Co., when they assert as "proofs" of evolution stuff that doesn't even pass the smell test, never mind actual scientific examination. Evolution is fideist at its core.
Sputtering nonsense without reading what I say makes you and evolutionists look dumb. Please try harder.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Rik's right. Evolution is all about selection of a bunch of crap that was put down in the first place. In the end, the best crap wins. But that says nothing about *creating new stuff*. Sometimes the "best crap" is not good enough, so we have to start looking into stuff and saying "ok, this appendix is just useless and may give this organism appendicitis". Evolution is excellent at producing results which are "just good enough", which sadly, is the same situation in which *nix, including Linux is in: just-good-enough. Evolution is not really great at producing novel things (yes, very very very rare "mutations"), and we don't exactly have time to do "while everything_is_not_perfect; do cat /dev/random > source; perform_fitness_test; done". Yes evolution is great at (all together now) RISK AVERSION. But risk aversion doesn't necessarily lead to the best things. Witness all sorts of organims which evolve in a fragile ecosystem, and then get utterly ruined when any given variable changes (climate change, cutting down rainforests), or organisms which are good at absolutely nothing but propagating themselves (ahem, viruses). It's silly to think millions of codemonkeys will just magically produce software which is always superior. Just look at all the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of useless projects on SourceForge...has this magical "evolution" helped these projects any? No. Decent management, coherent vision, intelligent coders, and yes, very often, a well-thought-out *design* are needed.
Users most often want software with a certain set of features at a certain point in time...not a guarantee that the magical process of evolution will eventually give them a real-time, fully-pre-emptable, "multimedia", embedded operating system that will butter their toast while reading aloud cluetrain and giving them an enema.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I dont think I ever mentioned your moral character.
Get a grip buddy. Slashdot shouldn't be for the faint of heart.
> I dont think I ever mentioned your moral character.
Maybe not you, but I'm constantly being told about how much I whine about this, it's free software, it's their hard work, it's my job to support them, it's my duty to pitch in and help out the team, I'm being unfair, all software has bugs, yadda yadda yadda.
Fine. Except for "all software has bugs", I think it's crap, but even if it's true, it really doesn't matter what a jackass I am for saying it. Ultimately I make a very cold decision: does it do what I need it to? If I really didn't care about Linux *at all* and didn't want to see it improve to do the things I need it to (like decent usb support, which maybe it has now but didn't just a year ago) then I wouldn't bitch. You don't see me bitch too much about the failings of OS/2 or QNX because they're utterly irrelevant to me, I don't use them at all.
It's kinda like a girlfriend: it might be a pain when she's nagging you, but it's over when she gives up and stops.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Hahah dude you are fucked in the head or something. I never suggested "helping out the team" or "throwing in your support". I'm just suggesting not to be such a brat about something you're getting for free and for which there exists solutions to your problem. Maybe you like to walk through life with blinders on. I dont know.
You sound like a total unix newbie to me. That's ok. We were all newbies once. You can make it. I beleive in you!