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KernelTrap Interviews Andrea Arcangeli
An anonymous reader writes "Andrea Arcangeli completely rewrote the 2.4 Linux kernel virtual memory subsystem several years ago, a surprising event during the evolution of a stable kernel series. A very intelligent 27-year-old from Italy, Andrea spoke with KernelTrap in great detail about the past, present and future of his Linux kernel efforts. An interesting interview ."
Andrea is a 27 year old Linux kernel hacker living in Italy and working for SUSE. Looks like yet another reason to play with it when it comes out
GeekLeak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
Linux hacker : Age 27 : lives with in parents house.
Who'd've thunk it, eh?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Very nice to see some recognition for the kernel developers and other Free Software developers.
To me, they really are some sort of modern day heroes.
Andrea Arcangeli: I've no degree yet, the only piece of paper I have is the high school diploma. I wasn't that bad at school, for instance I surprisingly got 60/60 votation in the diploma and maximal votes at University too for all the software related exams, and I loved studying physics and electronics too (not only computers). It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much. I've seen a lot of this with folks to receive their backgrounds from non-traditional sources such as Computer Learning Center and the like.
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much
THis amazes you. Lets think about it. Bill Gates doesn't have a formal education. No college diploma and he is the richest man in the world. Look at the show the apprentice. The final two. Formal education vs experience of doing it yourself. THe doing it yourself won with Trump. It's all over the place.
Evolution or ID?
Education isn't as important as you think, a truly intelligent person will assimilate knowledge with a depth and comprehension unavailable from intellectually inferior teachers. Academia is snobbery, and the state of affairs is any dumb shitheel off the street who can afford it can get the paperwork, but will still be a stupid shitheel at the other end.
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.
...
... and nor is education.
It always amazes me how stupidly ignorant white-boy can seem to be about his fantastic education system and how it seems you can't do 'anything' in the world without a certificate from some organized education front
Please. "Higher Education" is fine and dandy, but it is a luxury that many people, striving hard to survive and live another day, just simply cannot afford.
Many times, striving hard to educate oneself is simply far, far superior than "working hard to get educated by someone else"...
It sickens me how much people rely on 'modern education systems' for their personal enhancement. Personal enhancement is not something you can only get at school
Life is School. But school is not life!
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.
Yeah, mostly high achievers graduate from Yale and Harvard first and then distinguish themselves by serving their country selflessly before going on to make the world a better, safer place.Man.. You don't even have to read the article to know Andrea is MALE. It says it right in the news story with the pronoun 'his'. Is it getting to the point where you just blindly reply?
Hmmm.
Andrea spoke with KernelTrap in great detail about the past, present and future of his Linux kernel efforts.
Sorry, looks like she's a he. I was really hoping it would turn out to be a chick - chicks that can rewrite Linux components are extremely sexy.
uuh... no. you are just stupid and cannot realise that "Andrea" is a male name in Europe. stupid ignorant USian.
Yes, and it always amazes me when people with formal education accomplish so little. I've seen a lot of this with folks to receive their backgrounds from traditional sources such as Universities and the like.
I stole this
He has higher education, he just doesn't have the degree. The article indicates that he learned a great deal from his college courses.
;-)
A degree gets you an interview. What you learned gets you the job. AA skipped the interview step
Some of the biggest advances come out of people who don't succumb to the brainwashing of the formal education system. What's the point of getting schooled in the same mediocre theory everyone else is getting schooled in? College is useful for people who need it, but for the rest of us who can think for ourselves, and be imaginative on our own, it's just a system to make money by selling expensive parchment. Why do you feel you need a piece of paper to tell you who you are? It's such a crock.
If you understand this sentence you know you're a geek.
"free as in rights" That whole Bitkeeper talk got me thinking that maybe this guy is a little on the cheap side. Doesn't both him its binary, or closed source and would use it if it was freeware. Buddy why don't you take all that money your saviing from living with your parents and buy the damn thing.
Although, the license to use bitkeeper is really anti-competitive and agree when he said, "if no open source project could ever beat bitkeeper in the long run, Larry wouldn't need this weird licence in the first place."
Poor Andrea, now he is going to get slashdotted by a bunch of lonely geeks that didn't RTFA, and think that he is a she.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Currently this isn't possible. For our application we had to make a very nasty hack to our SCSI driver.
What we would have liked to do would have been something like:
Get physical address from libpci
mmap region to user process
open a rawio device
read()/write() the rawio device to-from the mmap()'d buffers to effect DMA transfers directly to the PCI device.
In our case (a streaming media server) we have no need whatsoever to bring the disk buffers into main memory.
Programmed transfers from main memory to PCI memory are expensive.
The name Andrea derives from the ancient greek "andros" which exactly means "man" so Andrea should be a male name everywhere!
A/S/L ?
... :)
Oh, we already got those
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.
Someone, I forget who, had a great quote on the topic:
"A degree will get you into an interview, but won't get you through interview. Intellegence may get you through a job, but may not get you a job."
after reading that article i feel as though my programming skills are on par with a primate.
Slide 12 says "Is it critical to learn in university? 1) A good question. Most students really just want a degree not an education. 2) Remember that a degree will get you an interview and maybe a job but what you learn determines whether you are successful."
Of course, being something of a autodidact myself - I have degrees, but learned much more on my own - I have to say "duh!". But certainly, as I've moved around and met more people, I've known plenty who seem to judge ideas more by the credentials of the speaker than the contents of the speach.
These posts make it seem like people who do get a degree from a higher education source are some how doomed to fail.
IMHO the reason you hear about people like Bill Gates is because they are the exception not the rule. It's a story of success over odds and people love that stuff, gives 'em hope.
What about all the advances made by people who did get a higher education. How many advanced medical procedures come out of some college dropout that was working in his parents basement.
Do you need to go to college to be successful, no. Does it help, yes.
I got the job with the company I work for because I had a degree, granted did any of the information I learned in my Java classes help me when I got here, not really, but my internship sure did. The degree just got me in the door. If I can't perform, I'm out.
I don't think that I am worse off because I got a degree, I don't think people who don't have a degree either. The goal is still the same it's just that the path will be a little different.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Uni is a joke.
I attend my (bachelor of) software engineering course one day a week (because I have to for about 30% of my grade in that unit) out of 4. That's about an hour out of about 12.
Occasionally, units will have difficult assignments, but generally it's easy sailing.
Still, I manage a GPA of 5.5. Others will do better doing the same thing, of course - I am in no way an extremely intelligent person - but I think it demonstrates how painfully basic university is for the average geek.
Which, really, are the only people who should be doing IT/SE in the first place - people with an interest, not people looking to make a quick buck. But that's a whole other post.
Why does he want to get trusted computing and DRM hardware running in Linux? I thought that was the kind of thing we were trying to avoid in Linux. Why should we trust M$ and the Trusted Computing Group
My boy, my boy!
Well of course you feel this way, you've probably spent upwards of $20,000 - $40,000 on your piece of paper when you could've bought your Ph.D online for only $795
"It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much." I'm not as amazed because I've always held the opinion that passion and determination are two of the primary ingredients of success and/or accomplishment.
-- "Someone's gotta go back for a shit-load of dimes."
Spoken like a bitter loser who couldn't hack it in college.
I agree! Unfortunately, the years of hard work and study I put into memorizing every piece of Star Trek minutiae just isn't getting me a job or a chick. Damn!
nt
Is anyone else concerned about the apparent contention over BitKeeper mentioned in the article?
-- "Someone's gotta go back for a shit-load of dimes."
Live off the land
Modify our cars
Hack computers
Understand personal finance
Write contracts
Defend ourselves in court
Defend ourselves physically
Handle a gun safely
Think critically
Change our government for the better
It seems to me that too much focus is given to understanding the past and not enough to understanding the present. Don't get me wrong, knowing the past is valuable, but I think that if we teach people about the present, people are naturally going to be interested in the past.
In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
Out of what? Where I went, 4.0 was the highest possible GPA.
I am in no way an extremely intelligent person
Or maybe you're just modest.
I found this bit really interesting (and insightful, actually, more on that below):
I bring it up because this is so contrary to the common opinion on /., which is that TCPA is unabashedly evil and has no utility. Andrea is obviously one very smart guy, and a person who feels the need to have complete control over his machine, but who likes TCPA in spite of the risk of misuse. Contradiction?
The fact is that TCPA *is* an extremely useful and valuable technology for systems that require a high degree of security. It's not clear to me that the average home PC benefits from it, but it's very valuable for cheap, high-performance key management systems and cryptographic accelerators, systems that contain valuable data (like many businessmen's laptops), and systems at critical points in network infrastructure. I'm sure there are other valuable, and non rights-eroding, applications as well.
In my work as a designer and developer of high-security systems, I'm extremely excited about the fact that we can now buy low-end computing equipment that has TCP hardware. It enables so much. The next step is TCP hardware that is tamper-resistant, or even tamper-reactive, but still cheap. For now, really high-security systems still require something better, but TCPA can fill the niche between systems that require serious security and those that can get by with purely software-based security (or no security, which is fine for the majority of desktops and laptops).
To be clear, DRM is a bad idea, in general. The business applications (self-destructing documents, confidential documents that cannot be printed) do have potential utility, but I doubt they're worth the complexity they'll create. And Palladium aka NGSCB aka whatever-it's-called-today is an unquestionably evil notion, focused on removing the ability of people to control their own hardware, in an effort to allow a couple of declining business models to prop one another up.
IMO, what geek activists need to focus on is not killing the development of tools like TCPA, but rather on legal and social means of ensuring our rights.
Tools are not evil. Only users are evil.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But is she a hottie?
> It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much
It always amazes me when people who have spent so much time in our horrible education system (and it is pretty bad in all countries) are able to create good software or to think at all. In my experience, good minds stay good in spite of education rather then because of it.
> digital oscilloscope (designing both hardware and software)
Nah, he's a pampered geek. Most of us still use analog. No fancy menus, just turn a knob if you want to change anything.
If you had extended your quote a little bit longer you might have noticed the part were he said that he specifically went to University to learn as much as he could from all of the computer and science classes. So he has a decent amount of formal education. He just didn't feel like jumping through the hoops to get the paper that goes with it.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
you know what - it never surprises me when someone who dropped out accomplished nothing.
... hi bingo
Someone with a bit of more knowledge on Latin please correct me if I am wrong.
AFAIK the reason "Andrea" is used as a male name in Italy is that it has the latin root of the word "Andros", which means "male". Keep in mind that in most italian schools you still have to study Latin, and sometimes even Greek.
I'm a bit off-topic here, but I imagined people would be interested to know this.
Diego Rey
diegoT
no its not ambiguous at all. "American" is ambiguous because Canadians and Mexicans (along with a bunch of other folk) are also from the continents of north and south America. so, by, USian (s)he meant from the "United States of America". its even in the name knobhead... "United States"ian. i can't believe slashdot is full of such stupid idiots.
IMHO the reason you hear about people like Bill Gates is because they are the exception not the rule. It's a story of success over odds and people love that stuff, gives 'em hope.
Exactly! Couldn't have said it better myself.
Why not fork?
Well of course you feel this way, you're likely an inconsequential slob who lives in a hood waiting for his break ala Quentin Tarintino while working at a video store.
Sheesh. Check the salary statistics for "college educated" versus "high school" versus "GED" and the like. The numbers don't lie. Unfortunately I fear there's nothing that will drown out your pathetic whining.
Gates is no longer the richest. That guy from Ikea is.
Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:
# Live off the land
If your high school is in a (sub/)urban area, how useful is this? Or possible?
# Modify our cars
My high school had auto courses (my school was in Southern Ontario, Canada)
# Hack computers
I took 4 or 5 computer courses in high school. Basic application use, programming in Turing and C++, graphics in 3D Studio, large projects.
# Understand personal finance
I believe there were business courses along these lines, I didn't take any, though. I think this was also covered in the general stream of math.
# Write contracts
# Defend ourselves in court
We had grade 12 and 13 law. I'm not sure how much time was given to contracts (I only took half of the grade 12 course), but we even went on a visit to court in both mandatory grade 10 history and optional grade 12 law.
# Defend ourselves physically
In grade 9 gym we covered wrestling. The upper gym courses covered more defense.
# Handle a gun safely
Not really a big deal in Canada. I know a lot of people who learned this in cadets or the reserves, though.
# Change our government for the better
History (Canadian, Ancient, American, 20th Century), Politics, Law...all covered this. Your comment about understanding the past rather than the present is missing the point entirely. But we did always talk about current elections in classes, even in elementary school.
# Think critically
In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
Doesn't calculating the area under a curve require critical thinking?? Regardless, Calculus wasn't taught till grade 13, and anything past grade 10 math was optional. If you're school taught you anything at all you probably learned to think critically. Didn't you have to write essays? Solve problems? Every single one of our grade 13 classes had an "independent study unit" which we had to do something on our own, requiring critical thinking.
We even covered media bias in our english classes (I didn't take the full english media class, but we did cover it in the required grade 13 english class). We took stories and advertisements from different newspapers and looked at their political bias. Then we watched some Chomsky videos.
As far as I can tell most Americans seem to need to move to Canada to actually get their American values.
BTW : you study greek in Italy only if you go to a specific type of high school, oriented to humanistic studies (law, literature, artistic ...). At my time it was true that you had to study at least some latin anyway, but I think this is changed now.
i think there's a big diffrence between an education and going to school and being told 'insert slot a into slot b.' First and foremost, if the only raeson you are in school is too learn a trade then you are better off with a deploma from a technical institute or teaching yourself (though self taught and fast learner is on everyone elses resumee too).
At the college i attend, as with most, there is a certain amount of breadth one is expected to overcome, and one is encouraged to take classes that are varid and give one a deeper understanding of a broad range of material. It doesn't take 4+ years to learn to code and you can't get a CS degree by takign only computer science courses. what's more a degree doesn't guarantee you a job. Thus, i'm somewhat lead to believe that the university experience isn't simply a maens to an end (because this can be obtained far more easily through otehr avenues) but a chance to grow as a person (not just intelectually, university provides ample oppertunity for getting drunk to the point of stupidity or unexpected sexual encounters).
of course i'm just from canada where university is considerably cheaper then down in the US, so a person can go to university and enjoy it without simply using it as a stepping stone to money.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Once it is widespread some evil corporation might try to influence the government to mandate that it be present in all computer hardware sold in the USA. While this in itself wouldn't be bad, it is just a hop, skip and a jump from mandating something such as Palladium and full DRM on all computers, since the trusted hardware will already be there!
If you don't think it could happen just look at recent bad legislation such as the DMCA and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Now imagine both the entertainment lobby and some of the software lobby bearing down on congress. Are your senators going to stand up to them? Mine won't.
Tools might not be evil, but Disney and MS are.
Lasers Controlled Games!
No he isn't. Check your facts kid. This was reported, but it was incorrect.
Bill Gates already was rich when he was born. He has a "the third" in his name for crying out loud. And considering he dropped out of Harward that's even more of a sign that he had more money than he could spend.
Once you have a lot of money making more seems to be a lot easier than when you start from scratch.
But hey, look at the GWB. Even if you are a C student you can become president. Well at least if your daddy is the president.
The parallel port ZIP drive maintainer asked them to provide a function prototype of this thing that they were talking about, of them (Phil/Tim) quickly whipped up a rough 50 line C header file which was turned into a working parport driver + parport enabled ZIP and printer driver (removing the infamous "printer-on-fire" message in the process). There were bugs in the parport driver (it was the first pass but you could print and use the ZIP drive together which was something that previously could not be done) but Phil/Tim/Andrea quickly pounced on the driver and straighten it out. Some of the routines for supporting NatSemi and SMC chipsets are there due to the ZIP drive maintainer not being able to use EPP mode on his Dell desktop.
When Andrea first appeared on the parallel port scene he was lacking a little confidence (appologising for his poor english which was far better than my italian :-) but once he got his feet wet with kernel hacking there was nothing stopping him.
Unfortunately I dropped out of the parallel port group around 2000 due to work commitments (linux hacking was one of those phases that I went through).
I congratulate Andrea on where his life has taken him.
ZombieEngineer
Formerly-the-hacker-who-maintained-linux-zip-drive rs.
Those don't cost nearly as much as you might think they do. My nephew has a IV after his name, and his son has a V. He didn't even have to take out a mortgage for those.
Why do you feel you need a piece of paper to tell you who you are?
I don't. It was an investment.
I spent 20k to make 10k/year more.
Oh lookie! Red Hat open sources everything except the proprietary bits that actually give their software market value.
Do you have any idea how much money RedHat has contributed to-- just for one example-- the GNOME project? To say nothing of their unconditional funding of Alan Cox for many years?
And I would HARDLY call IBM's contributions to the linux kernel "A few crumbs".
One could perhaps find good examples of companies profiteering from GPLed software without , but the examples you give are very very poorly chosen.
what about people like me who have to spend 5 years in college to get a job, when i probably know enough now (after 2 years). Nobody is going to employ me because ive only got a BND. its all nice and dandy to say that you dont need FE or HE, but you try to get a first job without it.
As I'm not sure what is meant by BND, FE, and HE, I can't really comment on your situation. I faced a similar climate, except most of the entry-level jobs I saw when I graduated (last year), wanted a bachelor's degree AND 2 years experience.
However, my comment was in regard to the statement "It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much." I never stated that you don't need an FE or HE. I only stated that "I've always held the opinion that passion and determination are two of the primary ingredients of success and/or accomplishment." Notice I said TWO of the PRIMARY ingredients, not all that you need. I should also point out that spending 5 years in college could be interpreted as indicating passion and determination in an individual.
-- "Someone's gotta go back for a shit-load of dimes."
ok fair point.
i forget that most ppl on slashdot are from the USA.
BND = btec national diploma
HND = highter national diploma
FE = further education (BND)
HE = higher education (degree, HND)