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Linux 3.10 Merge Windows Closes
hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 3.10-rc1 kernel marking the closure of the 3.10 merge window. The Linux 3.10-rc1 is the second biggest rc release in years and the closure of the merge windows means that the features expected out of the Linux 3.9 successor are chalked out. "So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go," Linus notes in the release announcement."
This is a phenomenon known as a Garden path sentence. The phrasing leads you to believe that windows is a singular noun, when it is in fact a plural noun with a different meaning. For anyone still confused: these are the windows to merge changes into source-control before release.
They changed the kernel enough so that the NVIDIA binary blobs are börken (sic) again! Something about whether is a real 2.4 kernel and whatnot. It seems just to be a test, but its anal and börken! I understand that NVIDIA is a commercial company and as such cannot keep up to the rate of development of OSS developers.
For folk who even after RTFA wonder whats new in 3.10, the best source is probably LWN
https://lwn.net/Articles/548834/
https://lwn.net/Articles/549477/
No, the problem here isn't a garden path sentence, the problem is illiterate Slashdot editorial processes as usual. The right headline was "Linux 3.10 merge window closes" but the usual brain damage morphed that into what you see now.
If there were several "merge windows" then that would be plural, but the verb changes to agree, that's how English works. So you'd get "Linux 3.10 merge windows close".
You can write the sentence "Linux 3.10 merge windows closes" in English, but you need "window" to be a verb and then the "merge windows" noun + verb assembly becomes a singular compound noun which you can use with the verb "closes". You would probably never want to do this, and it's not what anybody at Slashdot intended, but it's a possible English sentence. Shakespeare used to treat "window" as a verb, so you wouldn't necessarily be in the worst company, but Shakespeare was a fucking genius, the people editing Slashdot can't even compete with those monkeys Mr Burns had working on A Tale of Two Cities.
Are the things I care about - and I suspect most people do too, even if they don't know about it. The eed to transparently (or not!) accelerate spinning drives with SSD is a killer feature. I'm currently running a homebrew NAS on Linux and my VMWare hosts insist on doing sync mounts - effectively killing performance. By shimming some SSD in front of that, my IO latency bottleneck essentially goes away. (Lets leave ZFS out of this). "Desktop" distros will love this too - I see a simple "wizard" that asks "I see you have an SSD installed - would you like to accelerate access to your HD? Click yes and specify a maximum cache size" Presto - an instant increase in performing most tasks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Am I the only one who thinks having a version number which is subject to getting rounded off is a terrible terrible idea?
"Oops looks like this release has a trailing 0 on there... *delete*."
Terrible idea? That's how version numbers work. They are not ordinary decimal numbers, so you cannot round them like that.