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Linux Kernel 3.0?
An anonymous reader writes "A discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list between Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Linux guru Ingo Molnar, and a few others debated the name of the upcoming stable kernel release. The choices: 2.6 or 3.0. Evidently there's been enough improvements, most notably the VM, that they're leaning towards calling it 3.0..."
Now that Madelyne Toogood is free in society, does anybody know when she'll be making her first amateur porn?
................
Maybe I'm not the only one thinking of her in this way ?
Linus Torvalds's stances require a two-part response: first, a clarification of the prognosis implied by my previous letter; and second, a commentary on Linus's own prognoses. I would like to start by discussing Linus's proposed social programs, mainly because they scare me. The thing I'm the most frightened about is that tasteless porn stars (like Linus) are not born -- they are excreted. However unsavory that metaphor may be, it would be wrong to imply that Linus is involved in some kind of conspiracy to supply the chains that bind the individual to notions of self-loathing and unworthiness. It would be wrong because his ballyhoos are far beyond the conspiracy stage. Not only that, but he is typical of gloomy yahoos in his wild invocations to the irrational, the magic, and the fantastic to dramatize his propositions. I am now in a position to define what I mean when I say that Linus apparently wants to use us to fulfill his indecent mission. What I mean is that if you are not smart enough to realize this, then you become the victim of your own ignorance.
Last I checked, he wants nothing less than to grasp at straws, trying to find increasingly apolaustic ways to revive the ruinous excess of a bygone era to bounce and blow amidst the ruinous excess of the present era. His underlings then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with pretentious airheads who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that I have to laugh when Linus says that we have no reason to be fearful about the criminally violent trends in our society today and over the past ten to fifteen years. Where in the world did he get that idea? Not only does that idea contain absolutely no substance whatsoever, but in a larger context, his delirious analects remind us that acts of demagogism continue in our midst. Well, that's getting away from my main topic, which is that Linus is absolutely determined to believe that it is not only acceptable, but indeed desirable, to present a false image to the world by hiding unpleasant but vitally important realities about his publicity stunts, and he's not about to let facts or reason get in his way. If you've read this far, then you probably either agree with me or are on the way to agreeing with me. In light of what I just stated, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that by preventing people from seeing that the real problem is the complexity of a changing national and world economy, Linus's vicegerents can ridicule the accomplishments of generations of great men and women. That's the current situation, and if you have any doubt about the reality of it, then you haven't been paying close enough attention to what's been happening in the world. At the risk of repeating myself, I must reiterate that Linus claims that his words won't be used for political retribution. I respond that you shouldn't take threats made by raucous fence-sitters too seriously.
All I can tell you is what matters to me: If you don't think that he has a deficiency of real goals, then think again. Linus's policies occasionally differ in terms of how incoherent can they are, but generally share one fundamental tendency: They justify, palliate, or excuse the evils of Linus's heart. We must advocate social change through dialogue, passive resistance, and nonviolence. If we don't, future generations will not know freedom. Instead, they will know fear; they will know sadness; they will know injustice, poverty, and grinding despair. Most of all, they will realize, albeit far too late, that Linus is out to get on my nerves. And when we play his game, we become accomplices.
If you've never seen him prevent people from thinking and visualizing beyond an increasingly psychologically caged existence, you're either incredibly unobservant or are concealing the truth from yourself. I don't care what others say about Linus. He's still unrestrained, subhuman, and he intends to do the devil's work. But this is something to be filed away for future letters. At present, I wish to focus on only one thing: the fact that we can divide his ravings into three categories: nasty, brutish, and primitive. (The merits of Linus's activities won't be discussed here, because they lack merit.) The destructive power of Linus's fairy tales is their appeal to the stuck-up, the quasi-unstable, the fickle, and the postmodernist. But the problems with Linus's fibs don't end there. There are some crude ignoramuses who are lawless. There are also some who are dirty. Which category does Linus fall into? If the question overwhelms you, I suggest you check "both".
Although the dialectics of tribalism-prone praxis will create an untrue and injurious impression of an entire people by the next full moon, when he was first found trying to conceal information and, occasionally, blatantly lie, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Linus is planning to interfere with my efforts to identify, challenge, defy, disrupt, and, finally, destroy the institutions that force us to do things or take stands against our will, I'm unmistakably terrified. His bromides have paid off: already, he has had some success in his efforts to place stumbling blocks in front of those of us who seek value and fulfilment in our personal and professional lives. Implying that repressive suborners of perjury have dramatically lower incidences of cancer, heart attacks, heart disease, and many other illnesses than the rest of us is no different from implying that two wrongs make a right. Both statements are ludicrous. Linus's confreres are tools. Like a hammer or an axe, they are not inherently evil or destructive. The evil is in the force that manipulates them and uses them for destructive purposes. That evil is Linus Torvalds, who wants nothing less than to interfere with a person's work performance, bodily security, physical movement, or privacy rights.
There is a format he should follow for his next literary endeavor. It involves a topic sentence and supporting facts. One of Linus's former stooges, shortly after having escaped from Linus's iron veil of monolithic thought, stated, "Letting Linus wage an odd sort of warfare upon a largely unprepared and unrecognizing public is a recipe for disaster." This comment is typical of those who have finally realized that if we can understand what has caused the current plague of vindictive boeotians, I believe that we can then get my message about Linus out to the world. If he got his way, he'd be able to ruin my entire day. Brrrr! It sends chills down my spine just thinking about that.
Fortunately, the groundswell of quiet opposition to Linus is getting less quiet and more organized. Still, if we let Linus replace our timeless traditions with his disorderly ones, then greed, corruption, and racism will characterize the government. Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens. And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the media and educational institutions. Everybody loves a good game of hide-and-seek: find the person, find the hidden item, or, in Linus's case, find the hidden agenda.
When he hears anyone say that his supporters are too indolent to seek some structure in which the cacophony introduced by his philosophies might be systematized, reconciled, and made rational, his answer is to delude and often rob those rendered vulnerable and susceptible to his snares because of poverty, illness, or ignorance. That's similar to taking a few drunken swings at a beehive: it just makes me want even more to feed the starving, house the homeless, cure the sick, and still find wonder and awe in the sunrise and the moonlight. There is still hope for our society, real hope -- not the false sense of hope that comes from the mouths of the worst kinds of villainous turncoats there are, but the hope that makes you eager to free people from the spell of Maoism that he has cast over them. The whole premise of Linus's accusations is false, and his arguments are specious at best. I am not going to go into too great a detail about the most power-hungry so-called experts you'll ever see, but be assured that someone has been giving Linus's brain a very thorough washing, and now Linus is trying to do the same to us.
He has shown he's not afraid to be featherbrained, to put it mildly. Since I have promised to be candid, I will tell you candidly that if he continues to depressurize the frail vessel of human hopes, crime will escalate as schools deteriorate, corruption increases, and quality of life plummets. Linus says that I'm too pestilential to build a sane and healthy society free of his destructive influences. But then he turns around and says that everything is happy and fine and good. You know, you can't have it both ways, Linus.
I, not being one of the many nit-picky cretins of this world, find it sickening to watch him bamboozle people into believing that he acts in the public interest. Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement, but for all of you reading this who are not jaded mountebanks, you can understand where the motivation for that statement comes from. He will damage the debate about this issue, because we will have to spend lots of time correcting misunderstandings that are directly attributable to his half-measures. In this land which has befriended noisome provocateurs, Linus has conspired, plotted, undermined, prostituted, and corrupted, and -- hiding to this hour behind the braver screen of deranged, cold-blooded maggots -- dares to contrive and scheme the death of every principle that has protected him. In the end, we have to ask, "Why can't we all just get along?" This can be answered most easily by stating that his sinister stratagems break down ages-old institutions and customs. Linus then blames us for that. Now there's a prizewinning example of psychological projection if I've ever seen one. Prudence is no vice. Cowardice -- especially his intellectually stultified form of it -- is. Now that I think about it, throughout history, there has been a clash between those who wish to deal with Linus appropriately and those who wish to tell everyone else what to do. Naturally, Linus belongs to the latter category. Help me fight for what is right. Join your hands with mine in this, the greatest cause of our time.
You know, if there's nothing but pap like this in the submissions queue, it's perectly okay to JUST POST NOTHING AT ALL.
it's always bothered me in version numbers when 1.12 is newer than 1.2, for example. For some people that could be misleading. I've always prefered the 'build 132' and 'build 523' method, but in large, complex projects such as the kernel you'd end up with 'build 19283928909823709837216702314987897321023198472310 59'. Perhaps using hexadecimal could eliminate the large numbers, 'build 0xF63B1' for example. Of course the general public doesn't speak hexadecimal, and the version order would be misleading to them. There's always the microsoft method of naming the product 'product name' + the year after the year the product was released, i.e. Windows 98, 95, 2000. I think given all of these choices, the only reasonable solution is to use them all.
Presenting: Linux 2004 build 0x353E07-3489287 3.1.14
so sleazy to use, no wonder it's number one!
Fuck that. If we want it to be consumer friendly, let's call it Bob. Wait...didn't somebody try that already?
E
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland