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Linus on Linux in 1994
Vrallis writes "Ten years ago this month, Linux Journal christened their maiden issue with an interview with Linus Torvalds. It is definitely worth the read, and worth some reflection on just how far Linux has come in the last decade."
...and for once I'm not kidding!
lol... I love your signature... but how can one post any earlier while actually having read the article? I mean... every slashdotter is loading the page during the first 5 minutes... I think I never saw those "loading arrows" in FireFox spin for so long...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
It is not a problem with Linux per se. It is a problem with the culture. The Geeks spend too much time trying to show non-Geeks how uncool using Windows is, instead of trying to spread gospel, so to speak.
Today, the schism between these two classes is so great one views the other with hostility and mistrust. This is not how a society should evolve.
What should be done in the next ten years?
Nothing to see here
Isn't that program called "grep"?
Treasure? I doubt it. Linus is a great individual, and has my highest respect. But this is more than what HE accomplished. He has coordinated a great deal of it, but linux is no longer his. Linux is a community. Linus a world treasure? no. Linus is the the catalyst. The free software and open source movements were not his creation. Linus is the man that got things rolling faster. For that I thank him profusely.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Thing is, the geeks are wrong.
Remember the DVD authoring article of yesterday? One dood got his +5 informative for a longwinded explanation of how to do it, which involved about a dozen complicated command lines to type.
Try to explain to anyone other than a linux zealot how that's superior to the two or three mouse clicks it would take to produce with Ulead MediaStudio, or Adobe Encore (the first of which shipped with my burner anyways).
Security, sure, reliability - arguably - I've had linux crap out plenty of times for no good reason, usability - you have to be kidding.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
* Few really and truly understand it from top to bottom. ...And finally, Penguins and Kernel hackers both stay out of the sun for at least 6 months in each given year. (cue rim-shot here.)
* It appears to be a helpless critter and an easy target, yet it happily survives in conditions that would kill most other creatures.
*
Cheers,
/P
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I think the discussion of Micro-kernel versus monolithic kernel is academic at this point. Monolithic kernels have been made more flexible through the use of loadable modules. Window has shown that no matter what kernel you start with, you can still produce an unstable, insecure, and all around broken OS. If you try hard enough.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
No, it would only be meta funnier.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
...then I'll take some heed as to your notion of "appropriate" or not with respect to comments.
Linus et. al. have created an operating system I have used for over a decade and made over a million dollars using. If they find a little harmless humor or expressive freedom in swearing on occasion in the comments of their code, more power to them.
Saying "this implimentation if f*cked and needs fixed" is (in context) informative even if it is vulgar, and, quite frankly, it is their code, not Disney's (or $CO's).
i know that when i do coding, i try to make sure that not only the code itself is of high quality, but also that the comments are informative and useful -- not vulgar.
i just think that it's a childish thing to do.
It is no more childish than chiding someone who has put countless hours of hard work in for your benefit because their linguistic aesthetic differs from yours.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Funny you should mention Bill Gates. 10 years ago today, Bill Gates was telling his company to get with the next big thing, which was obviously the multimedia PC equipped with a CD-ROM. He never realized that a network card would be a more useful thing.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I'm not flame bating here, but what does Gnome have to do with Linux aside from the fact that its one of many programs that can run on Linux? From the Gnome about page, it mentions Linux twice with "or UNIX" right beside it.
The same would go for KDE (I have KDE running on a few students' Sun workstations).
What I think is impressive is that Linux is supported by many big vendors now like HP, IBM, Dell, SUN (wtf?), etc. I'm impressed that there are many nongeek household items that come with Linux powering them like the Tivo, Linksys wireless routers, wall mounted digital picture frames, etc. I think its impressive that the thing that I played with in my dorm room and in the physics labs at school now is my career. I'm impressed with the number of archetectures that it runs on. Currently, its alpha arm arm26 cris h8300 i386 ia64 m68k m68knommu mips parisc ppc ppc64 s390 sh sparc sparc64 um v850 x86_64. I'm impressed that when I went to the SuperComputing 2003 conference that Linux was pretty much _the_ OS to run clusters. I really think that Linux is a Good Thing(tm). It just happened, it works, and its not going anywhere.
Everytime I upgrade windows I not only have to rip the OS but a lot of the Apps to (ME=Poor3rdWorldSlave). Linux on the other-hand upgrades everything, supports older hardware better, by witch I mean my girls PI 233 MHz [IntelInside ;)] 92MB PC.
;) - but because it runs Firefox wich takes 10s to print to a post script file compaired to 30+ secs using Opera & PDF Machine - I love this ability of Firefox.
:)
I first used Win98 on it (2000 and XP won't install but it now uses Mandrake 9.2 & Gnome. It was an easy sell to get her off Win98 and onto Linux - not just because of the eyecandy
On the email side Evolotion is usable enough for her because she loves it enough to forgive it the speed loss compaired to using TheBat mail client on 98.
This all works for me beacuse I use her Linux box to keep my dialup working without a hic-up, which saves on the telephone bill - infinite calls = 60 hours for $0.7
I wish I could melt all my warez, but I just can't get my dual monitor display working (I use it as a tv/dvd player) on my ATI RADEON 7000 / S3 cards with XFree86 that comes with Mandrake 9.2 (think its ver 4.3) but will try with Mandrake 10 and a downloaded 4.4 - Hope to hell it works!
Cheers - enjoy the weekend.
Don't make your problems my problems!
Do you think your average user cares about this? Chances are he's running a pirated copy of Windows already, so he could care less whether or not it's free, and certainly won't bother to make the gratis/libre or beer/speech distinction since he simply doesn't care. What matters is the software support, and whether or not he can quickly and easily perform all of the tasks he's used to on Windows. What also matters is the hardware support, and the guarantee that the TV tuner card he just bought for $20 after rebate at Best Buy works properly with his operating system.
Of course, the issue with a lot of Linux evangelists is that they fail to realize how Windows is good enough for most people, that people are extremely stubborn, and will only change when forced to. My aunt Kathy doesn't care that Linux is made by a team of volunteers all around the world, or that Gnome and KDE offer many superior features to Windows. She cares that she can hop onto overpriced and under-featured America Online garbage and check her email. This is true of the majority of computer users, not the minority of dumb ones.
You can preach about free software all you want, but in the end, does it get the job done? And is it enough of an improvement to get people to give up what they've been using for years and learn an entirely new system?
There is absolutely no doubt that the Linux community has come a tremendous distance even in the last year or so. But we need to fucking work and work and work at improving the quality of the software, and drivers, if it's going to gain any mass-market acceptance. We're not done yet.
No it doesn't. Pretty much every country in the world says the Lin in Linus like the Fin in Finland. It's just the US had Snoopy for a while, and hey, if it's on TV it must be right. Right?
Get your own free personal location tracker
About five years ago I realized that MicroSoft sets the computer user community back by about 10 years. The reason is that they provide features that don't really work. Right now we have Windows that would some times not maximize, a task manager that sometimes cannot kill a process, an explorer that hangs and needs to be restarted by hand and an OS that some time is not be able to shut-down.
By contrast, I claimed to friends in 1997, if all this was done on more stable platforms -- Linux for example -- they would be late in coming and it would be some time before the grandma can send the pictures to the family by e-mail but the technology will be dependable when it is available.
This I believe to be one of the greatest harm M$ has done -- created features that don't really work. Most computer uses believe that the computer does need to shut down every night and that it does need to keep getting slow as time passes.
But I am happy to see that the features are becoming available in more stable environments and that these are taking less then 10 years to catch up.
I still have faith. Some day the computers will work as they aught to.
[Linus] has coordinated a great deal of it, but linux is no longer his.
I disagree. He has done an outstanding job of managing the dev process for Linux. One of the most valuable things he does is to say "no": he won't let Linux bloat up needlessly and he won't accept badly-written patches. He has a vision for the kernel that has turned out to be excellent; he ignored the prevailing wisdom of the day that microkernel was the way to go, and that worked out (look where HURD is compared to Linux), he pushes at all times for simplicity (consider his interactivity boost, consider his plans to replace numeric IOCTLs with file-like semantics).
He's not perfect. His continuing refusal to accept kernel debugger hooks in the mainline kernel is silly (he has claimed that kernel debuggers are a crutch, for those who don't fully grok the kernel).
But without Linus, the Linux kernel would not be as amazingly great as it is today.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
To pick a nit, Gnome and KDE aren't window managers, and there were tons out there for a long time -- fvwm, twm, you-name-it-wm. Man of them predate linux.
-monique
I'm sorry, but I believe you're wrong. Part of what makes the kernel so great is Linus's personal tastes. Lots of people write code -- many of which write different implementations of the same thing. Linus ultimately still determines:
1) What code goes into the official kernel
2) What direction it takes
Stuff that Linus thinks sucks or isn't ready doesn't go in. Yes, Linus deferrs much of this to his "liutennants", and yes, there are other forks of the kernel tree, but most of them try to stay in line with Linus' tree. There are no true splits that have any momentum behind them, like in the BSD's. Every other popular tree is the Linus tree +/- some patches. And Linus, even if only as a figurehead, keeps this together because of the amount of respect the community has for him. He didn't write every line of code, but he defined, and still continues to define, what Linux is.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Stop saying how bad windows is
Quite some contradictory statements you've made there. You might want to rethink things.
Nothing contradictory there. Even if you argue that Windows is good, you can also argue that Linux is better. In any case, and in my opinion, it's much better to talk <fill in the blank> up than to talk <fill in the blank differently> down. Think of it in terms of talking about your girl friend, or your religion, or your car. Nobody minds if you think you have a hot girl friend, or a better religion, or a flashier car and back up your beliefs so long as you don't hit people over the head with them. Few people are receptive if you tell them their girl friend is ugly, their choice of religion is a vertical drop to Hell or their car is the worst thing ever to sputter and belch its way out of Detroit.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Another argument is that the rumours (I didn't read the code myself) that flew around when the Windows code got out were that there was rampant profanity in it as well. This isn't to say that it's ok to do because Microsoft does it, just that it's probably nearly universal to swear in comments about broken hardware/software/whatever and the difficulties associated with working around it.
Honestly, I'd be worried about software that didn't have profanity in the comments. Mostly I'd assume the authors either trusted the documentation about everything (in which case it won't work) or just avoided completely doing the hard work (in which case it's a useless academic project) or perhaps just don't have a sense of humour (in which case I feel bad for them).
Oh, come on now. Andrew Tanenbaum is an absolute legend, he is a fantastic educator, and his books are absolutely brilliant. He had a point in that Linux was using an old architecture, and would have been better designed as a micro-kernel. But what makes Linux shine is not its architecture, but the fact that it is GPL'd, and the fact that it has been developed in a software Bazaar as opposed to a Cathedral. It's unfortunate that Tanenbaum is now remembered by the Linux crowd by this debate - Andrew's argument was correct, but unfortunately completely missed the point of Linux (a point which wasn't obvious at the time, not even to Linus himself).
In 1994 Linus wanted SysV binary compatibility. In 2004 commercial Unices want Linux binary compatability. How ironic.