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Linus Torvalds Moving to the Silicon Forest
Evilive writes "According to KATU News, Linus Torvalds and family will be moving to Portland, Oregon so he can oversee the Open Source Development Labs. Torvalds says he and his family will make the move after his children finish school next week. Sayeth Linus: 'The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available) by moving during the summer.'"
The weather is just toooooo dreary... It's not the rain, it's the dark, cloudy, dreary, scattered showers that get to you... At least the price of housing is much cheaper. My prediction 5 years - MAX!
I can't be the only one (at least not the only non-American) who's hearing this term for the first time. Portland?
As someone who has two fairly major Physics papers due in 4 hours and lives in Portland I can easily say this is the best news I've heard all day.
But why is this news? I hear you ask. Oh come off it, what's wrong with a little cult of personality now and then. Sometimes I think that's the only thing keeping Apple afloat.
Anyway let me give you a quick list of reasons why Portland is great:
1. Free Geek, our own local geek run charity.
2. lot's of great microbrews and wifi enabled bars.
3. And of course the beautiful weather.
And with that, where ever you are, may your beer be micro and your operating system free. Cheers
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
We get 200+ days of zero clouds a year here at a minimum, every year. Portland gets 200+ days of the opposite.
Yeah, I was surprised the first time I was in the Bay Area and the person I was riding with got out at the gas station to pump their own gas. In Portland, it's not just that you don't have to pump your own gas -- you aren't allowed to pump your own gas.
Our property taxes suck, but I still like the fact that when I buy $2,500 in computer parts, I don't have to spend another $250 just to satisfy the state revenue division.
I'm working at OSDL and looking forward to having Linus here on-site. :-)
We got the confirmation today that yes, he's coming, and will have a cube here with the
rest of us. I expect he'll be working from home a lot but who knows.
Linus had visited last year not long after he joined the lab, and we asked if he'd be moving up here. At the time he said he'd had enough of cold weather for one lifetime, so this is a surprise! (Well, not a total surprise, Portland is a great city to live in, IMHO. Some of us figured he'd want to move up here once he had time to think about it.)
Who knows, he might be serious. He might pull a Michael Jackson on us, going from highly-respected kernel hacker to cosmetic surgery freak in a slow and spectacular 20-year fall from grace. That's right, he'll still be around 20 years from now, churning out mediocre rehashes of his old kernels and approaching bankruptcy as the result of extravagant spending habits. See, that new house is the first step.
Plus you gotta admit that with all the weirdos in the world, there has to be at least one person somewhere that would pay money to be surgically altered to look more like a penguin. What better candidate than the glorious leader of the Linux revolution?
Or maybe Linus is just being funny. Damn European humor... too refined for me.
Never tried PADS. I have tried Orcad, which you would know if you had actually read my post; Cadence owns Orcad now, didn't you know? I've done designs in Orcad/Cadence (Capture/Layout), DA/BS, and the full Altium Protel DXP suite. They all have pretty massive flaws. DA has an interface that is totally, totally counterintuitive and needs improvement; the only reason they won't change it is all the board hacks who've been using it forever and would scream bloody murder if it changed.
In terms of design capture, I seem to work fastest in DXP and slowest in DA, with Capture coming in somewhere in the middle. As to board layout, I can't honestly compare my work speed, since my BSRE layouts were all small, and the layouts I've been doing in DXP are comparatively quite large.
That said, I don't like *any* of them, I just happen to dislike Mentor more. I know more than a few people who agree with me on that.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
As an Oregonian who has lived in several places across the state, I will have to propose amendments to your pieces of advice:
* Visit a McMennamin's hotel for lunch or dinner...
But don't expect good service or clean silverware.
* Fareless Square.
Get a concealed carry permit first.
* Don't swim in any river that Intel has named a chip for. Seriously. It's not their fault, but I mean it.
There's nothing wrong with the Deschutes. But then again, most of you Portlanders can't see past the top of Mt. Hood, so I don't expect you to know anything about Oregon's high desert.
Now, to add on to your advice:
* Visit one of the fine sushi places in Portland. Sushi Town in Hillsboro is good. Not the best, but good.
* Visit Bend and go to the Deschutes Brewery if you want *truly good* beer. And good service.
* If your a Finn, go to Junction City (that's just northwest of Eugene) during the Scandinavian Festival's Finland Day.
* Don't take your kids to the Rose Festival carnival area. The ride operators deal drugs.
* Avoid downtown Portland (and downtown Eugene) whenever the WTO is meeting in this hemisphere, when a major timber sale is scheduled to happen, when war breaks out, when the President is in the Pacific Northwest, or any other time when it is reasonable to forecast traffic-slowing protests.
* Check out Ashland at least once.
* Get a Shedrain umbrella.
* The air sucks in Eugene.
Well, that's about all I can think of.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
To what extent is Linus' move to Portland something he wants to do versus something he *had* to do to be close to OSDL? I am a big fan of telecommuting and geographically disparate teams collaborating. The company I currently work for (in the UK) is, sadly, not a believer in the concept. I just wonder whether a corporate will ever be a believer in such things? Perhaps pressure from IBM and other corporate stakeholders in OSDL have caused Linus to move physically closer to the project? I sure hope I'm wrong though - and it is purely coincidental that he picked Portland. Or even if he did move closer to OSDL, it was out of his own accord as opposed to pressure from corp stakeholders. What are other peoples' views on how corporates in the US (and elsewhere) look at telecommuting?
-- Manik Surtani
os2004 is being held in Portland the last week of July.
He probably shouldn't but it would be interesting to see him add to some of the tutorials or discussion groups.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.