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Linus on SCO, and the Desktop Being 10 Years Away

An anonymous reader writes "In this interview from last week's Linux.conf.au in Australia, Linus Torvalds talks about how the SCO lawsuit 'riled' him and led him to spend a week writing an application to archive his email, and how he think Linux will take 5 to 10 years to become mainstream on the desktop."

24 of 827 comments (clear)

  1. How selfish of him by DumbSwede · · Score: 4, Funny
    Yes, he has only given us the best, most stable, FREE OS in the world. My God! Doesn't he realize he owes us every waking and sleeping minute giving us more for free, than to relax and just do some little quick projects for himself. He really has some nerve!

  2. Re:I agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I think we need to just grit our teeth, clench our buttocks [...]

    Uh, I'll leave that one to you, champ.

  3. Re:How much is your time worth now-a-days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I use Zoe

    Lucky you! Most of us geeks don't have girlfriends to archive our mail for us!

  4. 10 years away?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Gosh.. who the hell is gonna use computers 10 years from now?!

  5. Bummer! by xankar · · Score: 4, Funny

    Damn, and I thought it was this year

    --
    ~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
  6. And the number is .... by McSnickered · · Score: 5, Funny

    That was "literally" a great interview. I spent, "literally", 5 minutes reading it. And "literally", I spent another 1 minute determining just "literally" how many times he used the word "literally" in the interview.

    The number is, "literally", 7.

    --
    They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
    1. Re:And the number is .... by Dave2+Wickham · · Score: 5, Funny
      Why spend literally 1 minute?
      [dave@tc4 ~]$ wget -O - http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,84 07881%5E15841%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html 2>/dev/null| grep literally | wc -l
      7
    2. Re:And the number is .... by 3247 · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's plain C-ly.

      --
      Claus
  7. Austrailians by WormholeFiend · · Score: 3, Funny

    can't even spell the name of the capital of Canada!

    O T T A W A!

    Eh.

    1. Re:Austrailians by f13nd · · Score: 5, Funny

      you spelled 'australians' wrong :P (i'm canadian too eh)

      --
      www.necroticobsession.com
    2. Re:Austrailians by Coryoth · · Score: 4, Funny

      you spelled 'australians' wrong :P (i'm canadian too eh)

      In case you curious we New Zealanders spell it "bastards"

      Jedidiah.

    3. Re:Austrailians by Crypto+Gnome · · Score: 2, Funny

      er, don't you mean "baaaa-stards"?

      --
      Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
  8. best part of interview by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Q: Do you think that's good, seeing Linux being used in little devices, Xboxes and all sorts of places it wasn't meant to be?

    A: One of the must fun things was I bought my wife one of those electronic picture frames... I didn't even know it - I just decided I wanted to buy it because we'd just bought a better camera, and we had some good pictures of the kids. So I went out and bought it, and only when I was uploading my pictures, the night before Mother's Day, I was uploading them and looked at the technical specifications and found out it ran Linux!

    That's much more fun than big machines.

  9. Re:Okay I can take this !!!!!!!! by abscr · · Score: 3, Funny

    Alright thats enough ! I live in Canada's Capital Ottawa... And I am getting tired of people calling it Ottowa !!!!!!! grrr ! Do you see me saying Wachingtin or Nu iork...

    Washington? New York? The article wasn't from the United States. And anyway, why don't you post something useful instead of complaining about a simple mistake. In fact, it might not be a mistake. Germans spell America "Amerika", while the US spells their country "Germany" when it is clearly "Deutschland".

  10. Re:the biggest barrier of all by Reziac · · Score: 4, Funny

    My mom is 74 and I just showed her DOOM, and she asked how she could get that on her computer too. I about fell off my chair!!

    --
    ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  11. Re:the biggest barrier of all by asparagus · · Score: 2, Funny

    In six months when she's making you her bitch with the railgun in deathmatch we'll see who's laughing. Go granny go!

  12. Re:I agree by TheUser0x58 · · Score: 2, Funny
    a smooth, intuitive GUI

    Wait, are you sure you're talking about Windows?

    --
    -- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
  13. Re:I agree by Bloater · · Score: 2, Funny

    For all the Grandma lovers...

    Grandma shouldn't have to understand XML. The GUI utility should be used to configure the application, so the config file format is a non-issue.

    Furthermore, for the Grandma lovers...

    The GUI should consist of two buttons... "Solitair" and "Off".

  14. Re:Linux Desktop by Simonetta · · Score: 1, Funny

    when it does i can..
    Then i can file...

    Just a little bit of background on primary human languages.

    The popular language of carbon-based biped humanoid lifeforms that is known as English requires that all references to the first-person singular using the word 'I' be capitalized.

    You may want to adjust your translation interface for this usage because ignoring it makes you look stupid to the human lifeforms that employ this method of symbol manipulation for their primary means of written communication.

    Good luck with your continued interaction with this species!

  15. Re:I agree by spectre_240sx · · Score: 3, Funny

    I dunno, I kinda liked having cars talk to me :). I think the problem arises when people start talking back and expecting another answer.

  16. Re:I agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    > but I'm not sure that a one-size-fits-all
    > smooth, intuitive GUI can even exist

    It has to exist! The proof is that in StarTrek they can operate the computers of an unknown alien civilisations in only a few seconds.

  17. Week for email indexing? by smallpaul · · Score: 3, Funny

    But it has for example forced me to - they've subpoenaed me for a lot of emails, and I spent literally a week writing a tool to index all my emails, so that when they give a better criteria for me, what they really want, I can actually produce it.

    Of course it would take a kernel hacker a week to write a tool to index emails. He probably wrote it from scratch in ANSI C with dependencies only on stdio.h and string.h. I can just see him spending the first day writing a module to do fast pattern matching across character buffers. Don't get excited Linus worshippers: I'm half kidding. Half.

  18. Re:I agree by Soruk · · Score: 2, Funny

    Operating the alien computers is easy. Reading Klingon, on the other hand...

    --
    -- Soruk
  19. Re:Linus and the P2P Fileswapper victims of the RI by Asprin · · Score: 2, Funny


    Linus is the only person I've ever heard of taking a lawsuit as an opportunity to write some new code. The world needs more Linuses!!!

    UGH! For the *last* time, people, it's "one Linus, two Lini"!

    [grin]

    --
    "Lawyers are for sucks."
    - Doug McKenzie