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Torvalds the "5th Most-Powerful Man in Tech"
An anonymous reader writes "According to silicon.com, Linus Torvalds is the fifth most influential man in technology. The bio they have written for him isn't the most flattering to the open source community though. I quote: "If it wasn't for the presence of Lara Croft and Xena Warrior Princess, techies around the world would have posters of Torvalds on their walls."
It goes on to say: "In truth Torvalds best work is in the past"... which seems to negate their own argument for having him in there.
Also in the Top 5 is Steve Jobs (1) who comes out on top of Bill Gates (2).
As an interesting aside, the writer of the Sobig virus even makes it in at Number 42..."
That's it? Should be #2. Linux is the second best OS in the land!
Does this mean he now has a chance of obliterating Gates in "Celebrity Deathmatch" ?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
And how do I get back to aol.com from this site? I just installed this Internet. HELP!!!
The bio they have written for him isn't the most flattering to the open source community though.
Whatya mean? the last line says "Rumour has it he's a Guinness man as well." Mmmmmmm...Guinness...
Trolling is a art,
You don't have a poster of Linus on your wall?
The ranking is the top Agenda setters, not the most powerful folks in tech as the poster states. For this reason I can easily see S. Jobs and Gates towards the top. This is slightly different than influence and worlds different that "Most Powerful".
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Where's Darl McBride on the top 50? I'd say he's pretty influential right now. Look at him, he has the UNIX world groveling before him!
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
They are not the same! Influential people can be those who influence those with power but may have little or no power themselves. Think of advisors to POTUS.
... but you can reasonably expect to sit down and have a beer with him after work if you're in the right city. Can you say the same about numbers one through four?
It's nice having people in the upper-levels of Linux kernel development who actually read and post to mailing lists...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Bill Gates is powerful, because he's so insanely wealthy. He then can influence all sorts of people with his power.
Linus Torvalds may be influential in tech circles, but whether that translates into any normal interpretation of "power" is another question.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Stroking the ego of a virus writer, way to go. I'm sure that'll entice her to stop.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
And he's such a regular guy (seemingly) that it probably gives him a bit of a shudder to read that. I don't envy the position Linus is in though, I mean looking back, he didn't set out with the goal of being worshipped globally by computer nerds, he just had this re-write of Minix he was working on. Eesh!
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Jobs' role is overrated. Some Mac "innovations" (like pinhole to eject media) no-one ever follows. He makes a colorful splash with his colorful consoles, which end up meaningless in the tech world (the candy-colored iMac look had more influence on staplers and George Foreman grills than computers).
Due to the locked-in relationship of the hardware and software, his influence is limited for the most part to the tiny Mac world. This could change as soon as his music store goes beyond its limited beta situation.
It goes on to say: "In truth Torvalds best work is in the past"... which seems to negate their own argument for having him in there.
Why does that negate their own argument?
Power doesn't mean "how much have you coded recently", it means "how much influence do you weild."
Bill Gates hasn't coded anything in over 10 years, but he's made the list - are you suggesting he's not a power either?
It seems we are the most influential people over silicon.com servers.
My neighbor's
Of course Linus wouldn't be the most "powerful" - he lets others make up their own damn minds. He doesn't own any companies, and he lets others use his ideas with only the agreement to give credit where credit is due, and use derrivative ideas in just the same way. The power is not in the man, but in the ideas. This "ranking" shouldn't be counted as an insult to open source in any way - powerful men are not a particularly valid way to rank ideas.
Ryan Fenton
"If it wasn't for the presence of Lara Croft and Xena Warrior Princess, techies around the world would have posters of Torvalds on their walls."
But I DO have posters of Torvlads on my walls :(
Besides, they clearly displayed their cluelessness by not listing Carrie Ann Moss and Natalie Portman, who enjoy an almost exclusively geek following and great popularity therein....
I'd say John Carmack is badly missing there. He's been trendsetter since years.
His agenda seem quite influential, much of Linux' success is due to his agenda (through the GPL and software).
He may not be at the top, but he should be on the list. And above the Sobig author...
What about RMS, he has done a lot of work for Free Software.
If Linus gets to #5 being the embodiment of Open Source, how can they neglect GNU ?
So here's the Google Cache
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
The list has India's prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at 8th.
India's boom - largely engineered by Vajpayee - means some analysts are predicting the country could face its own IT skills crisis over the next five years.
Nothing can be further from truth. Personally Vajpayee has had no effect on IT in India. He has no ideas or plans for the future, as far as IT is concerned. I think Narayana Murthy would have been a better choice.
I doubt the list is a well researched list.
karma : former act as leading to inevitable results
One of the biggest problems with a lot of people today is that they equate economic success with success in general. However, in the case of Apple and Steve Jobs, the success is in pushing new boundaries that other companies didn't want to touch. Apple has been VERY influential (and therefore Steve Jobs). They popularized the GUI, they brought a sense of style to computing (which is very important regardless of what anyone may think), they shifted the look of the box itself from the ugly beige box to the sleek designer models and now they are bringing Unix and 64 bit processing to the consumer (It could be argued that Sony did this with the Playstation).
The Linux crowd and Torvalds have been hugely successful in starting a movement away from proprietary OSes and again making this movement more visible. Of course *BSD was there first as well as GNU, but with Linux the concept was popularized among the clued in folks in the IT world. Whether you like Tovalds or not, you cannot refute that he has influenced the IT world tremendously with his work.
The best thing is that neither Jobs nor Torvalds needed to be the dominant market leader to influence anyone. There is more power in thought than money. That is the way things should be everywhere.
Un-news
No 5. Linus Torvalds creator of Linux
Last year's position : 21
Hero of the open source movement, geek made good, thorn in Bill Gates' side - there are so many reasons why people vote for Linus Torvalds each year.
In a nutshell it's because he embodies the idea that there is always another way, an antidote to the Microsofts of this world, evidence that the idea of the 'community' within IT is still there. If it wasn't for the presence of Lara Croft and Xena Warrior Princess, techies around the world would have posters of Torvalds on their walls.
Torvalds started work on the Linux kernel while he was at university in Helsinki in 1991 and since then it has been taken up and developed as a serious alternative to proprietary software.
In truth Torvalds best work is in the past but he got the ball rolling and he continues to be an Agenda Setter because he is the very embodiment of the open source community. A vote for Torvalds is not a vote for the man but more a vote for what he represents.
Linux now poses a major threat to Windows and a series of adoptions in the past year, especially at governmental level (and there are more expected in the coming year) means that threat is only set to increase.
Rumour has it he's a Guinness man as well.
"If it wasn't for the presence of Lara Croft and Xena Warrior Princess, techies around the world would have posters of Torvalds on their walls."
Are you sure it wouldn't be Ellen Feiss?
And more importantly, you might actually want to. I quote the article:
How many of the top 4 are closet Bud Light drinkers? =)As an interesting aside, the writer of the Sobig virus even makes it in at Number 42..."
So the answer to life the universe and everything is a Windows worm? Somehow it is all very clear to me now... :)
The list isn't even aligned right! What kind of geek are you!
1. Steve Jobs 26. Rod Aldridge
2. Bill Gates 27. Stelios Haji-Ioannou
3. Greg Dyke 28. Ian Foster
4. Hu Jintao 29. Dmitri Sklyarov
5. Linus Torvalds 30. David Blunkett
6. Roger Cole 31. Erich Gamma
7. Sam Palmisano 32. Jeff Bezos
8. Atal Behari Vajpayee 33. Donna Dubinsky
9. Peter Gershon 34. Donald E Knuth
10. Carly Fiorina 35. Masayoshi Son
11. Rupert Murdoch 36. Michael Gough
12. Michael Dell 37. Keiji Tachikawa
13. Arun Sarin 38. Marc Benioff
14. Richard Granger 39. Sir John Sulston
15. Fred von Lohmann 40. Larry Ellison
16. Eric Schmidt 41. Stephen Hill
17. David Levin 42. SoBig author
18. Stephen Carter 43. Naomi Klein
19. Steve Linford 44. Henning Kagermann
20. Christian Ude 45. Mario Monti
21. Greg Aharonian 46. Ulrich Schumacher
22. Scott McNealy 47. Tim Berners-Lee
23. Terry Semel 48. Steve Ballmer
24. Sergey Brin 49. John Malone
25. Ben Verwaayen 50. Michael Moritz
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Predictive text is shiv!
Not flattering? The main problem with this bio is that it is poorly written fluff by some hack with a lot of space to fill. There's substantially better journalism in People. Ignore this junk.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I'd expect the headline to say "Steve Jobs Most Powerful Man in Tech" rather than focus on Linus being 5th most powerful.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I love the fact that Good old Rupert was knocked down to size by a pioneer in e-izing independent media, Greg Dyke. I have loved the BBC's style of reporting since living in Birmingham for a year. Since then Greg Dyke has moved the BBC to be one of the best news/tv sites on the net. Regardless of what you think of the BBC itself he has paved the way that other media giants are going to intigrate thier services onto the Net.
For the worlds worst example see FOX News.
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
The most innovative hardware technology in computing today is coming from Sony. Everybody else has architectures from the past; Sony is actually selling new ones, in volume.
Incidentally, Motorola is about to bail out of the semiconductor business. They're trying to sell off their semiconductor operation. Sad.
I noticed that one group of people was not represented among the top 50 at all - people connected to video gaming. Don't tell me that companies like Sony are less important for the future of technology as virus writers or even 15-minutes of fame people like Dimitri Sklarov.
If you have to ask, it wasn't.
of the silicon.com web site, CmdrTaco has been added to the list.
/. which leads to...
Unfortunately, this leads to the revised list being posted on
From Silicon.com's Agenda Setters 2003:m l
http://www.silicon.com/as2003/analysis2.ht
===============
Someone who could well have fallen into this category this year but
didn't make the list at all is SCO CEO Darl McBride. He has led his
company's charge to get credit for what it claims is some of its code
turning up in Linux. So far the row has taken the form of a lawsuit
brought against IBM, headlines in the media and SCO invoicing some
users for Linux roll outs.
However, when asked what happened when his company was served with a
request to pay a SCO licence for Linux, panellist Ric Francis,
Safeway's CIO, said: "I told them to stick it. At the end of the day it
is never going to fly. It's the last dying breath of a company that is
never going to make money."
McBride - in the headlines yes, agenda setting no. There is a
difference.
===============
I am surprised not to see the PERL GOD, Larry Wall up on that list. He might not be powerful, but he is influential.
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
isn't she Briney Spears mother or something?
Someone mod this guy up just to annoy him, please.
0x or or snor perron?!
I don't have a poster of Torvalds, nor RMS, or ESR. hell, i don't have posters of Lara Croft nor Natalie Pr0tman.
I do however have a full-sized billboard advertisement for a national brand of Instant Grits.
do() || do_not();
The CEOs of Intel and AMD aren't even on the list. I'd think they'd have something to do with setting the tech agenda.
Vote for Pedro
"Boy's club mentality"??? Maybe there are few women on the list because few women choose to enter technical fields. In all my electronics and computer science classes, there were a very small percentage of women, and there was no "boy's club mentality" either. In fact, most of the guys would go out of their way to help the women.
The Chinese government is looking to develop its own 3G standard, while its support for the development of an open source alternative to Windows has already had Microsoft, somewhat ironically, complaining of anti-competitive practices.
I know most people on slashdot saw that as irony, but until PHB reads it, chances are he/she will not. So I am glad that at least silicone.com wrote it. It would be better if Wall Street Journal published similar assessment, but for now, I take this as a positive sign.
A religious war is an adult version of a fight over who has the best imaginary friend
guiness is hardly the end all of beers. I can think of quite a few stouts, porters, and pub ale's I'd rather drink before I'd have a guiness. My favorite of course being Young's double chocolate stout. Guiness just has a distinction of being readily available worldwide.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Personally, I wouldn't list him in the top 50 either. Top 100, yes. He started something very cool, but his own personal influence on tech has faded. Emacs was a long time ago, and Hurd hasn't gone very far. His influence is similar to Steve Jobs, in that both are visionaries. The reason that Steve Jobs is number one on the list and RMS isn't on it is that Steve Jobs will do anything to carry out his vision. RMS is a dreamer and a thinker, not a doer. I would have listed Eric Raymond in the top 50, though.
I thought it had been proven that he didn't say that?
I used to have a girlfriend who worked in IT (around the time of the HP-compaq deal) who acknowleged that Fiorina was the role model for women in IT, and that she wished that she wasn't - because Carly was making them all look bad.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Why is it that technical fields are intimidating to women? There is no biological reason for them to be inherently adverse to such work. So the root of the problem must be social.
The same argument "women dont want to enter the field" was used for most fields that were predominatly men, until that is women no longer felt there was a social barrier.
Technical fields are intimidating to just about everyone, except the truly gifted, and there are about as many gifted women in IT as there are gifted men.
The root of the problem is social.
Extremists gather in groups to tell women there is a vast conspiracy to keep women away from computers. Then when a woman encounters a troll who attacks anyone and will use anything they can think of as an insult, she thinks: "they are right. Everyone is out to get me. I give up." The problem when you train people to play a victime, they become one and don't even try. No matter who a person is, no matter where a person goes, no matter what they do, there are people who will shit on them. One has to learn to deal with these wackos, not cave in.
Then their is the fact that most men are stripped of their emotions. From childhood, they are taught they shouldn't have any. No wonder most of them become obsessed with machines. Women tend to be more normal. "most of those females I know who program and use *NIX as much as I do don't obsessively do so. On the contrary, most men I know who program and use *NIX do so all night long, sustaining themselves on Jolt and Oreos."
Well, if all these women want to enter the field so much, why don't I see many women's names in open source projects? All they need is a computer, some books, and a webpage. No "boys club" conspiracy can stop them from doing it. Do you think SourceForge and Freshmeat delete projects because they are run by women?