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Linus Torvalds Promises Profanity Over Linux 3.10-rc5
hypnosec writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.10-rc5, and he is certainly not happy with the changes merged last week. Rc5 is bigger than rc4 and has code scattered across its entire code base because it addresses many outstanding problems. In the release announcement, Torvalds noted, 'I wish I could say that things are calming down, but I'd be lying. rc5 is noticeably bigger than rc4, both in number of commits and in files changed (although rc4 actually had more lines changed, so there's that).' Torvalds has warned that he is going to start cursing again, and said, 'I'm going to call you guys out on, and try to come up with new ways to insult you, your mother, and your deceased pet hamster.'"
Calm and measured explanations of just what the coders are doing wrong would be ever so much more helpful. If all Linus is going to do is mouth off then perhaps it's time he just STFU and GTFO.
Lucky that he told us before. No one could have seen that coming. I mean, like he's ever done it before... The hamster thing is heartless though.
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
Go into acting !! Or maybe woodwork !!
Torvalds has warned that he is going to start cursing again, and said, 'I'm going to call you guys out on, and try to come up with new ways to insult you, your mother, and your deceased pet hamster.'"
This is why businesses choose Microsoft.
When you are maintaining a project of this size and you get bothered by little annoying cosmetical fixes and non-critical bugs you do lose your temper. I have to say he stayed pretty civilized till now. I suggest we start a kick-starter project to give torvalds the vacation he really needs!
Grow up.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
You understand what "release candidate" is right? A release candidate is not a time for adding new enhancements. It should be for streamlining and tightening the code for release. The fact that RC5 is bigger than RC4 means that people either were not doing their jobs in the previous 3 releases or that the code submitted earlier was so crappy that it needs more work. Release candidates should get smaller than the previous not larger.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Everyone has to have a hobby, right?
Seriously though, who the hell cares if the RC is bigger than the one before it, or whether the changes are scattered everywhere? If there were any number of concerns that needed to be addressed before the next release then it wasn't ready to go in the first place. Just test the hell out of everything, make sure nothing is broken, and make sure that each change was necessary and correct. In short calm your tits and keep coding.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
There's a more complete explanation in the article.
At this point in the RC cycle, the expectation is that only bug fixes will be introduced. The latest merge include changes that had nothing to do with listed issues.
New features belong in the 3.11 branch.
sticks and stones and furniture may break my bones, but dissing my dead hamster...that's fucking WAR LT!
He died before rc3, you insensitive clod.
Captcha: bitches /., something NSFW?
I hope they meant that as a verb or in the canine sense.
Seriously, that was the captcha. What's next,
It's the release manager's call to decide what to take. He could've said "no" but didn't. Heck, he could've yelled at the developers and said "HELL @#$^ING NO" in public, but he didn't.
It's also his job to take the heat for unpopular decisions and defend them if necessary.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I mean speaking as a developer when I'm working and at this point I don't want to put in any new features. It's usually one of the managers or QA with a stupid "Hey lets put in a new feature right at the end" request.(And then it becomes "How willing am I to put up a fight over this?") I'm honestly surprised with no managers (and I mean business oriented managers) that this still happened.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Why the PEER-REVIEWED-FUCK does the world need to know about what a software developer thinks about the patches the team is sending him? What's next? An article everytime one of the kernel volunteers has a dump?
To whoever reads occasionally the kernel list, there are no news here. This could fit in the Sun's or the "OK! Magazine" inner pages, but ./'s front page? Really?
Does someone oversee what gets into a RC? Or do the kernel maintainers get to commit whatever they want?
I'm not a linux kernel developer, but in my company when we get into the RCs, we have pretty tight control in which bugs/enhancements get added.
What's Linus' specific role in this besides "yelling and screaming"?
Doesn't this happen all the time?
Its how the sausage is made.
Ah, The Onion, funny as always!
In terms of resource consumption, yes, windows > Linux. Yeah, go for it. Why on earth did Microsoft claim that Windows XP could run on 128 meg of ram? Oh yeah - because being honest, and telling the world that XP really needed 512 meg to run well would increase the cost of computers to the point where people might explore Linux - which STILL can be configured to run on megs of ram, rather than gigs of ram. (before someone points it out, I'm very much aware that when poorly configured, Linux can waste 4, 8, or even 16 gigs of ram on the desktop environment and a browser)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Streamlining and tightening code increases the "size of the release candidate" because that size is the number and size of the patches, not the absolute size of the code base. These "unnecessary" patches are meant to be merged during the merge window, and they are exactly what Torvalds is angry about. The release candidate phase is for fixing bugs, especially regression bugs, not for code beautification. And FFS Slashdot, the exponential backoff for ACs is ridiculous.
Maybe Linus has been playing Maniac Mansion recently?
Just because you can microwave the hamster doesn't mean that you should.
I'm still running Debian on 64 MB of RAM. With Xwindows and icewm. I can even browse the interwebs for a while with firefox until I hit a page with javascript requirements that beat the OS requirements. Sadly that is becoming the norm (I'm looking at you gmail)
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Fork to "Evanux" than. Love it or leave it.
Table-ized A.I.
Am I right in thinking that Linus isn't complaining about kernel improvements in general, but only about them being made so far into the RC series?
Right after a new development window has opened, I assume that he's totally happy with receiving a maelstrom of enhancements, cleanups, new features, and everything else that constitutes useful progress for Linux, isn't he?
I hope so, anyway. But of course he's dead right that this should not be happening during the RC countdown.
I'd be grateful for a confirmation, or otherwise.
correction: "then"
Table-ized A.I.
A masterful troll.
Stop biting contrubes then.
FTFY
Companies like Google and Amazon have made millions of dollars using Linux and Linus still has to live in an igloo eating dried penguin.
Yes! Linus is a wimp. Steve Jobs threw a monitor and Ballmer followed up with a chair but all Linus managed was to be bitten by a Little Penguin.
No - I refuse to restrict myself to your definition of "modern full-feature DE's". There is really no need for these desktop environments. Eye candy is eye candy, and it adds little to nothing to the user experience over something such as Enlightenment or Mate. Further, there are various desktops that are more "lightweight" yet, and some of them are quite attractive. (personally, I don't find them ALL to be attractive - but that is somewhat beside the point) Waste is waste, it's really that simple.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No. For a comparison, you need to look at usage requirements. If all you need is something on the level of fvwm, you can't get there with Windows.
Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business? -- Bill Gates
Of course, what you don't often hear is the response to that question, where they decided through intensive bureaucratic meetings to compromise between the two positions and make a browser, but make it such a bad browser that it would slowly drive them out of business. The rest is history.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I'm still running Debian on 64 MB of RAM
I can still Windows on 64mb of RAM, as I long I don't specify the version either...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
How about Linus does his job instead of complaining like a spoiled teenager? All he has to do is reject the commit and provide a link with the standards. If the idiot decides to submit again, ban the griefer. He has no right to complain about anyone but himself. He is sounding more and more like the mental nutcase, RMS. While I might get modded down, any rational person will see the logic.
Would it be possible for you to reference an OS newer than 12 years old to try to make your point? And do you realize that the OS will run, but what you want to do might have it's own additional requirements?
FWIW, I believe that he was taliking about Debian stable. (Sorry, I don't remember the name.)
OTOH, that's a guess, as I've never tried to run in that particular configuration.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Don't feed the troll, kids.
yeah, once a guy said to me, 'hey, it looks like you're running bare X!'
that's right, I was
So then we go over the Microsoft's Windows 8 team where it's like "It's okay guys. We can patch it. I'm sure people will get used to the changes."
Microsoft should hire Linus for just a day to come in and scream at people about the shit design job they did on Windows 8.
When you've had as much success as Linus, then we will listen to what you have to say oh great anonymous coward. Until then, keep posting anonymously on the internet.
Everyone's a critic, and everyone's got an opinion. Yours is worth the absolute same as every other anonymous asshole.
A release candidate is NOT!! the place for streamlining and tightening the code. It's a place where only bug-fixes should be added to anything beyond documentation.
Your comment reveals why Linus is tearing his hair out trying to get the release candidate changes smaller.
Save the cleanup and streamlining for the next version, NOT for the release candidate.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I would ask though whether that's useful or just technological masturbation.
When RAM is plentiful and cheap and even your average smartphone has more than 1GB of RAM are you sacrificing anything by only using a few MB of RAM instead of GBs?
There clearly is purely wasteful uses of RAM but there is also fully utilizing your available resources. RAM is cheap and plentiful. I would rather a system be responsive and fully featured than tick off some statistic on how few resources it uses. A 486 uses less power than an intel core i7. But you'll get a lot more per watt out of the i7.
Ultimately the metric I care about most is productivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_humour
False. Just installed Linux Mint 15 on my netbook. It runs MUCH better with that (and uses much less resources) than Windows 7. Cinnamon and MATE are forks of GNOME, and are full-featured DEs.
I have always had an issue with "Hero's" in people minds, either being a religious figure, or a vocal member of some group.
hat
They are all human, and most of us experience some point(s) in our lives where we seemed to do some great things, however we are human we fail, make mistakes, or just loose track, or our morals.
In Open Source Figures such as Linus and RMS, while they did good things in the past, have been using their fame to push what ever tantrum they have at the time. Because of their Hero status there will be enough people who will follow them, they will allow their mind to twist to follow their views as they are considered a Hero.
For all people you need to take a step back and realize they are human, no better or worse then us. The Stereotype Superman or the Stereotype Dr. Evil really doesn't exist, people are complex with good and bad.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm still running Debian on 64 MB of RAM. With Xwindows and icewm. I can even browse the interwebs for a while with firefox until I hit a page with javascript requirements that beat the OS requirements. Sadly that is becoming the norm (I'm looking at you gmail)
Yes, because 64MB of RAM should be enough for anybody, amiright?
Just because you can, doesnt mean you should. In the age of large and cheap computing resources, saving every last byte and cycle is less of a concern than it used to be.
Unlikely. Even according to the minimum requirements for Squeeze it said that 64MB of RAM is really only useful for a thin-client. A real workstation/desktop needs minimum of 256 MB.
I prefer command lines myself.
Irrelevant. An OS is useless on it's own, to consider it usable it must be able to do at least simple tasks. Which it isn't.
Sounds like someone is taking a page out of Jobs' book.
He nailed it. At the rc4/rc5 level, the ONLY things that should be going in are bug fixes against this release. Not "cleanup" or new features. Those belong to the next release.
Linus is dead right on this, and everyone who has EVER done serious development should know it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And you'll get more per watt from a lower clocked i7 or an ARM... And power is all important on battery powered devices...
And although ram is cheap, it still has a cost, and that cost soon adds up... Think of hundreds of workstations, or installations of virtual machines etc, halving the memory requirement could be a significant saving.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Or is that Ubuntu naming convention?
If you were paying me, MAYBE you'd get some traction with "finding new ways to insult me", though probably not in a legal sense.
As it is, if you bawl me out, I have no qualms to tell you to shove your head up a cows arse and blow rasperries for the afternoon, so fuck off out of my face and let me continue my work.
I remember looking at Enlightenment and thinking how bloated that was.
UI needs less chrome, not more.
Metro^WModern UI looks nicer these days, but it still doesn't hide the fact what's under the hood.
That Linus is just a run of the mill, kick-down, kiss-up asshole of the sort graphically described in the book The No Asshole Rule?
First of all: In Finland there is this fine institution that Swedes call "Management by Perkele". What we are witnessing is intra-communal communication of the working team. We do not (usually...) hear about the swearing in private corporation meetings, but open source community is public.
Secondly: A tight military-like control is required to handle something huge as Linux kernel project. You can try to silk-glove it, but in Finland the usual way is to say (brutally...) honestly what you are thinking. (Part of that "Perkele" management.) This also requires that the participant taking the beating beats back if needed using similar brutal honesty. Honesty is the key. "Show me the code", as Linus said. May the best code win.
Thirdly: Evolution works the best in harsh environment. If you are a delicate little princess, you should probably not do Linux kernel development.
No - I refuse to restrict myself to your definition of "modern full-feature DE's". There is really no need for these desktop environments. - Who are you trying to fool? GUIS are there to assist you. Sure some platforms overly assist the user, but living in a terminal/command line might actually slow you down at times. Why not be able to get all the information you need at a glance, vs scrolling through log files/grepping your life away. Not trying to troll, but you might be the exception.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
why smaller? from RCx to RCx it should stay about the same..
You understand what "release candidate" is right? A release candidate is not a time for adding new enhancements. It should be for streamlining and tightening the code for release.
That "streamlinin and tightening the code" is the problem; he wants only bugfixes for critical issues, not code cleanup and no minor bugfixes.
Actyuallym, unless or until you get off of your ass and start managing a fork, yes it is. So get moving, MUSH!
"...Linux people are deeply immature!", but then I remember that Linus is only doing his impression of Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs.
And right now I'd take bets that Android hybrids conquers the desktop before Unity, Gnome 3, KDE or any of the existing solutions do.
That depends on how quickly other Android distributions adopt a way for applications to opt in to Samsung or Cornerstone multiwindow mode, which allows applications to opt into having variable window size, through the manifest. Currently, the Android CDD allows applications to assume that the screen area will never change after an application is installed, and this mentality of all maximized all the time leads to workflow problems analogous to only having room on your desk for one piece of paper at once. If Android supported multiwindow mode like Ubuntu for Tablets ("Side Stage") and even Windows RT ("Snap an App") do, a four-function calculator app wouldn't need to fill the screen.
Soooooo to make sure this is always the case, Linus should obviously be reaching out to code obfuscators. Obviously legible, robust code is not at issue -- shorter, smaller code using more geeky twists and obfuscations is the best possible fucking idea for any huge, gigantic-ass code base.
I mean, I can understand getting pissed about new features being added. But obviously the point of a release candidate is to slowly compress and obfuscate the code into smaller and smaller renditions until it's humanly unreadable because, hell, fuck, god damn, that's how progress works in open-source land. Smaller = better.
Oh I dunno, maybe I'm talking out of my ass, here. For all we know, Linus' bottom line is that the same OS works on both smartphones and desktops.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
If Linus isn't happy with the code, why go through with the release? And why is he unhappy? Why not hold the release until his issues are resolved? This makes no sense.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
I'm sure. He didn't say what he was doing with it, though, so I presume that it wasn't a full install. There's a lot of stuff in the standard install that isn't really needed for many purposes. Many people severely customize it.
OTOH, he did say he was using firefox, which does raise some questions...though it doesn't provide many answers.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Don't like the open contributions, shut up and close it then.
Maybe it's time to refactor the linux kernel. Get rid of all the cruft and strip the kernel to it's bare essence. Then add services to it via a common interface. Like a network or something.
Not trolling, simple fact, as any developer who works on a team knows.
More Profanity means a better OS? Send all your words to Microsoft then! ;)
I really believed that profanity was a new technology I didn't know about.
;P
I'm not sleeping well lately.
which is why it takes gigacycles (and 10x the ram) to do the same things we used to do in a few megacycles.. It's one thing to not obsess over every extra loop or cache miss, but that doesn't excuse the slovenly, bloated mess that is the average software application today.
nor hide the fact it's ill suited for desktop use.
Fix it, or use something else then.
A good argument is a good argument, a bad one is a bad one. Anonymity has no bearing on this.
Exactly, the resources equation only makes sense if you consider your time as a resource. For example I use python to automate nightly builds, I don't care that it takes 4hrs to run instead of 2, I don't care where things are physically located I just assume it will page to disk if it needs to. However I do care how much time I spend polishing it vs how much time it saves doing manual builds.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well maybe, just maybe if he had a stable driver ABI (at least between releases in the same stable tree) he'd:
Why every fucking driver under the sun belongs in the kernel tree (and thus, every driver change impacts the kernel) I have no idea.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Newsflash: trading CPU cycles and RAM for more rapid development and use of shared libraries (rather than re-inventing the wheel constantly) is considered to be an acceptable trade-off.
Given that 16 GB of ram runs about $100 these days, running with 64 MEG is just making life more difficult for yourself than it has to be.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you think a desktop environment is all about eye candy you are mistaken. yes there is eye candy, but the more important thing they provide is a development platform for applications.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I mentioned eye candy. It's always been somewhat important on Windows. In the Linux world, K made a big push to implement eye candy, then I became aware of Enlightenment, then Ubuntu announced their Unity, then finally Gnome did the same. Somewhere in that mess, Windows decided they were interested in the Metro thing - was it soon after KDE 4 was released?
Anyway - what I'm saying is, to much emphasis is put on the eye candy. Those things that the "development platform" is needed for, have been done all along on the older, simpler, if less pretty desktops.
What I'd LIKE TO SEE, is some of that wasted energy spent on developing Enlightenment. It has all the eye candy anyone could want - but uses far less resources than any comparably "pretty" desktop. Had Ubuntu picked up on Enlightenment, it's anyone's guess where E would be today. I mean - they created an all-new DE in quite short order. Had they taken Enlightenment, and spent the same resources on it, they could have customized E to do everything that Unity does, at much less cost in resources.
Ehhh - I guess when you get down to it, there's no accounting for taste, or for common sense. There are people who actually claim to LIKE Unity!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Most people using debian call Iceweasel Firefox, it even installs a /usr/bin/firefox alias...
And yes, you can run a custom Wheezy install (base system with most services disabled, raw X) in 64MB without swapping too heavily.
I'll let you in on a secret. I'm not 100% comfortable in a CLI only environment all the time. My brain is aging, and I forget simple things sometimes. Other things, I never knew. I prefer a GUI most of the time. My argument is against those heavy weight DE's that require a gig of memory just to run. All those widgets and whatnot - they don't actually add anything to the user experience. Mostly, they just define new ways to do the same old stuff. Which only means that you and I have to learn the new ways that the developers have decided is "better" in some way.
I'm not exactly stuck in yesterday, but neither am I inclined to learn a new DE every couple of years because the younger generation deems it necessary.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Assertion != Argument
If the development is put into E to give it similar functionality to KDE or Gnome as an application platform then guess what? It will grow to consume resources in a similar manner.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
But if you keep ignoring the minor bug fixes to solely focus on the critical stuff, you'll NEVER get the minor things fixed. And frankly, cleaning up code so it's better for the next guy shouldn't ever be a problem either. Now yes, there should be a "final date" where you aren't changing more items in a given upcoming release. But being an ass about things certainly isn't doing anyone any favors. Granted, Linus has his set of uber-fanboys that worship him. He could shoot an elderly grandmother in broad daylight in the middle of a filled football stadium, and those fanboys would say she deserved it. But at some point, someone needs to drill it in Linus's head that Linux isn't "his" anymore. Not solely anyway.
A Windows 7/8 desktop is faster and consumes less resources than a Linux desktop (for fair comparison, we should look at modern full-feature DEs such as KDE, GNOME or Unity).
I am on a machine with an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ dual core processor and, if I really wanted to, I could pick a 64-bit Linux distribution and run it. In fact, for a while I was running a 64-bit OS, but in the interest of conserving memory (since I ended up choosing to run what could be considered a "full-featured" or "bloated" Linux distro--openSUSE with KDE4) I decided to switch back to 32-bit to conserve memory.
Would you care to tell me how the hell I could get 64-bit Windows 7/8 to run on this thing at all, without an upgrade to a bare minimum of 2 GB RAM? And I should point out that 2 GB is the max that this machine can handle in the first place. I should also mention that I have run both Windows 7 and Windows 8 on this system in the past briefly, and 1GB is simply inadequate for it.
Windows most definitely does *not* have lower system requirements than Linux, and that remains true even when talking about the most heavyweight of distributions. I should also add that it is almost always the web browser (not necessarily the distribution itself) that brings my system on its knees; I make heavy use of browsers with dozens of tabs open, but even just opening a browser with no tabs really eats into memory these days. Chrome, Firefox--they're both bloated pigs. Add a single Gmail or Google Voice tab and you've got a hell of a memory hog.
If anyone is a mental case, it's you.
Uhhhh - no, not exactly. The E libraries work differently. Everything works differently. I've run exactly the same applications side by side on an E installation, and a Gnome installation, and then a K installation. E uses more resources than something like OpenBox, but considerably less than G or K, and certainly less than Unity.
E's problem is that some things simply remain unfinished.
I'll grant some slim possibility that you are partly right. Let's suppose that to finish all the unfinished stuff, E ends up using 10% more resources than it does now. It will STILL be significantly more efficient than any of the heavy weights in use today. People who are carefully conserving every single miliwatt may still opt for OpenBox or similar, but the differences aren't going to be deal breakers for all of us.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
But at some point, someone needs to drill it in Linus's head that Linux isn't "his" anymore. Not solely anyway.
He's still leading the project. If you want to be a maintainer or contributor, you either follow his rules, or you fork the project and start your own.
I couldn't agree more. Fuck this asshole.
Operating systems should be seen and not heard. They should "just work" and do the bidding of the apps. There is little point in having a whiz bang OS/DE if the apps blow up in your face - or vice versa.
Nos Morituri te salutamus
Just because it's considered to be acceptable, does not mean that it is efficient.
Newsflash: My new-ish router only has 128MB of RAM, and runs Linux. My previous router also ran Linux on 32MB. And in times not-so-distant, I had a mail server, DNS, IRC server, router and multi-user general-purpose shell machine with 24MB, that even from time-to-time hosted a remote X app or three. It worked fine.
There's never an excuse to be wasteful of resources. Never. Suppose it costs a developer 50% more time to create resource-efficient code. And suppose that it costs users an extra $50 to allow inefficient code to run well on their computer.
$50 * millions of users == $$$. (I'll let you estimate how much optimization is worth in terms of developer-hours vs. end-user expenditure, if you choose. Myself, I can see quite plainly that whatever the figure is, it's well beyond my paygrade...and that's without factoring energy.)
Kid-proof tablet..
My "old" Android smartphone has 256MB of RAM, and would continue to work fine for me today if not for more-recent bloat: It's a far faster computer than my desktop of not-so-long ago.
Instead, it languishes on the corner of my desk. (I could sell it at the kiosk in the mall that eats cell phones and dispenses cash, but it's worth more to me as a paperweight than the $2 that they offer for such an "antiquated" device.)
Ultimately, the metric I care about most is getting the maximum use out of my dollars. Bloat always runs counter to that.
Kid-proof tablet..
Sure you can. Heck, if you have the right version of Windows, you can even eschew the GUI entirely and go straight to the command line. Or, if you're looking for a lightweight DE, you could opt for the Minimal Server Interface.
Granted, it's not quite fvwm, and it's certainly not available on consumer-grade Windows, but it's out there if you really want it and are willing to fork out the money for it.
Nobody cares that your router runs in 128 megs of RAM, when it does not provide the ease of use or rapid development provided by high level application frameworks. And yes I've built plenty of Linux boxes (with as little as 4 MEG - your 32 meg router was 4x the size of my first X11 box) myself. Thing is - they aren't desktops.
As far as a desktop environment goes - It isn't a "waste" of resources, it is a trade-off for programmer efficiency..
As any computer scientist will tell you - computing power scales, human processing power does not. In other words, processor time/RAM is cheap. Programmer time is not.
This is why we do not code everything in assembly language - it is only used if absolutely necessary.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I didn't bother talking about my 4-megabyte Linux forays because I thought it might sound cheeky. (I didn't graduate to X11 until I had 8MB.)
And I'm here to tell you that sloppy programming costs billions of real-live dollars in hardware annually.
And everyone cares about their own pocketbook.
Put that in your rapid-development pipe and smoke it.
Kid-proof tablet..
Because it doesn't do as much. If you compare E to QT or GTK I'm sure you'll find that it has nowhere near the same feature set.
Considered why that may be?
I think you'll find it will end up being somewhere around the same size as KDE or Gnome if the feature set is comparable.
I've seen it happen with Linux vs. Windows in fact. Windows 95 copped a heap of shit for being so large and requriing so many resources when it was released.
Fact is: despite being a hacked 32 bit environment on top of a 16 bit boot loader, in terms of what it actually DOES, it is comparable with a modern Linux distribution of today. Except Linux still doesn't have standard high level libraries for sound, graphics, a standard widget toolkit, etc.
Now obviously Windows 95 is a pile of shit and fails for many other reasons, but in terms of what it supports vs. size, it makes a typical linux distribution look pretty bloated. Linux used so much less back in the day partially because it did so much less... It's smaller than Linux is now because it had a company behind it who made the call one picking ONE widget set, ONE sound library, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
and it wasn't even a radioactive penguin to get superpowers.
When RAM is plentiful and cheap and even your average smartphone has more than 1GB of RAM are you sacrificing anything by only using a few MB of RAM instead of GBs?
Your *average* smartphone? I don't choose to throw out a perfectly workable smartphone Every Damn Year, so my year old phone only has 384MB of RAM. It still works, but some modern apps that add glitz at the expense of functionality are becoming seriously painful on it.
You sir, are what is wrong with the planet today. Too many teenage developer weenies that are so abstracted away from the machine that they've forgotten how to program efficiently. "Oh, but I need all that RAM to make my program cache things so it can be quicker". So why is it so much slower to fire up a pdf viewer on my phone with 384MB of RAM than what it was to fire up on my 12 year old laptop with 128MB of RAM?
All of my machines are maxed out. All of our rackfulls of ESXi servers at work are maxed out. Adding more RAM is not *easy*. Making devs do their jobs would be easier.
But if you keep ignoring the minor bug fixes to solely focus on the critical stuff, you'll NEVER get the minor things fixed.
Linus was not suggesting that minor bugs fixes should be ignored in perpetuity. There is a time and a place for everything. He was saying that the release candidates are not the time nor the place for these minor bug fixes. The time and place for those is the next release.
And frankly, cleaning up code so it's better for the next guy shouldn't ever be a problem either.
Please get a clue. There are most certainly times when cleaning up code for the next person is definitely a problem. A release candidate is the prime example of when such needless changes are a problem.
But at some point, someone needs to drill it in Linus's head that Linux isn't "his" anymore. Not solely anyway.
Linus is simply doing his job, a large part of which consists of herding cats. It is obvious that his previous, less flamboyant, attempts to get this particular point across failed. Just because Linus is right about Linux kernel development and you are dead wrong doesn't make me an uber fan-boy worshiper. Nor does it make me a condoner of murder.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
And that date is called RC1.
We're at RC5, and he's complaining about people still changing stuff rather than fixing the remaining bugs, so the next release can get out and they can go back to changing stuff.
They are not arguing GUI vs CLI. They are arguing something like XFCE vs a modern, 3D accelerated animated desktop.
I got win xp to run on a p3 with 32 mb ram and an IDE drive. It ran like a slug but it did run.
Oh I dunno, maybe I'm talking out of my ass, here.
Indeed. He's talking about the size of the delta, not the size of the entire kernel.
"RAM is cheap" is a lazy way out. I usually hear it when people do not want to spend some time optimizing their code. It is why firefox at this point is beating chrome in memory usage. Because the mozilla guys woke up and said 'hey our crap sucks lets fix it'. Now if they can keep that up...
Optimizing is the FUN part of coding. I do not know why people do not like doing it. Sure it is hard. But you are doing the same work with less resources. Resources that can now be used for something ELSE. You get to whip out all that cool stuff they crammed into your head in college about computer science.
Think about this take zlib for example. It has been fairly well proven at this point that you can get 3-5% extra compression just by using another library. Yet everyone uses zlib. What if it was 50% faster and 10% better in compression? But no one bothers. Take the emulator Bochs for example. Everyone said 'it is slow because it is in software'. Couple guys came along and got it within 5% of vmware speed all in software and not using dynamic recompile. The guy doing it has lost interest, but he was fairly confident he could be faster than vmware eventually.
I am in the same boat as you with the smartphone. I have a 3 year old droidx. Thinking of getting the galaxy 4. But can not justify it in any way whatsoever (other than it looks bad ass). The one I have works perfectly well for what I use it for.
Big fucking deal.
Linus is Finish (Swedish speaking) and they are the most candid people I know, to a fault.
To quote another Slashdotter today..
"Lighten Up Francis..."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Not when it's one random jackass criticizing the work of someone who has obviously been successful. Uninformed opinions mean absolutely nothing, no matter how the words were arranged to sound logical. If he had any legitimacy he wouldn't post anonymously.
She was a saint.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
which is why it takes gigacycles (and 10x the ram) to do the same things we used to do in a few megacycles.. It's one thing to not obsess over every extra loop or cache miss, but that doesn't excuse the slovenly, bloated mess that is the average software application today.
Exactly. We shouldn't treat the computer as having "unlimited CPU and RAM", which is what Computer Science teaches (and Java/C#/VM-language developers generally expect) because it isn't. You don't need to fret over every little byte usage in memory or CPU, but you also need to be conscience of it so you don't waste it either.
There is no reason why a program from today should run slower than its equivalent 10/15/20/30 years ago. Yet that is often the case.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It's not about restricting yourself, it's about a fair comparison. If you want to compare the Windows Desktop to Linux Desktop, it makes sense to compare the Explorer shell with the most common Linux equivalents, Gnome or KDE, or maybe Unity.
If you want to talk about how Linux has other options for graphical shells, well then so does windows. Blackbox running on windows may well consume less than blackbox running on Linux, it's something I would be interested to see.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Nobody cares that your router runs in 128 megs of RAM, when it does not provide the ease of use or rapid development provided by high level application frameworks. And yes I've built plenty of Linux boxes (with as little as 4 MEG - your 32 meg router was 4x the size of my first X11 box) myself. Thing is - they aren't desktops.
Ran Desktops with 4 MB RAM myself. Not saying today's desktop's shouldn't have more memory, but that additional memory and CPU should let you actually do more with the computer, not the same amount or less.
As far as a desktop environment goes - It isn't a "waste" of resources, it is a trade-off for programmer efficiency..
Incorrect. It's not a matter of "programmer efficiency", it's a matter of "software efficiency". The two are not necessarily the same.
"Programmer Efficiency" is how well the programmer is skilled in the field.
"Software Efficiency" is how efficient the software is with resources on the computer it is running on.
A skilled programmer (e.g, one with a high programmer efficiency) can create software that has a high "software efficiency". A unskilled programmer (e.g, one with a low programmer efficiency, typically in high school or right out of college) will not typically write software that has a very high "software efficiency", rather it will be very low on the "software efficiency" side. They're just not skilled enough to choose the right algorithms or implement the algorithsm in a very efficient manner.
The problem is that too many companies want to only use programmers with a low "programmer efficiency" because they're "cheaper" per hour than one with a higher programmer efficiency. Unfortunately, two (or more) low skilled developers do not necessarily equate one high skilled developer (Mythical Man Month).
And yes, you can choose to have the software be a little less efficient, but knowing how to that smartly is a key thing. For instance, you want your producitivity suite to be highly efficient in the user interface, but it doesn't need to be as efficient on its background processing. Knowing how to make that trade off requires more experience.
As any computer scientist will tell you - computing power scales, human processing power does not. In other words, processor time/RAM is cheap. Programmer time is not.
Computer Science views the computer resources as unlimited, inline with the Turing Machine (unlimited storage, unlimited processing, etc.) Software Engineering views the computer resources as limited, inline with computers you actually find in use around the world.
Yes, human processing does not scale well, and programmer time is not cheap. But that doesn't mean you can waste the user's time and resources either - they're not unlimited. And it can very well make the difference between a user purchasing your product or a competitors, or using your FOSS software versus buying something proprietary.
CPU, Memory, and Hard Disks are relatively cheap; but they're not necessarily cheap for the end-user.
This is why we do not code everything in assembly language - it is only used if absolutely necessary.
No one said you should use Assembly; only that you need to be conscience of the computer resources that are used by your software. Whether you are using Assembly, C, C++, Python, Java, C#, SmallTalk, Ada, Pascal, Cobol, Ruby, D, or whatever the next big language is - you have to be conscience of what the computer is doing and when in order to make your programmers work efficiently in ways that have the least system/user impact.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
And I'm here to tell you that sloppy programming costs billions of real-live dollars in hardware annually.
And everyone cares about their own pocketbook.
Put that in your rapid-development pipe and smoke it.
Well said.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Take the emulator Bochs for example. Everyone said 'it is slow because it is in software'. Couple guys came along and got it within 5% of vmware speed all in software and not using dynamic recompile. The guy doing it has lost interest, but he was fairly confident he could be faster than vmware eventually.
I remember when the speed-up for Bochs came, and it was primarily because the QEMU guys made a kernel module that allowed them to use the hardware to run some of the instructions instead of having to virtualize every single instruction. Now everyone has access to the "VM" instructions on Intel/AMD processors, so you can do that without the QEMU kernel module; but then you are limited to having a host CPU be the same CPU as (or at least a compatible variant of) the virtualized one.
And, FYI, Bochs is one of the few virtual machines that can emulate a full X86 and X86-64 computer with ANY computer architecture as its host because they emulate the entire computer.
Now, if they've gotten some additional stuff since that one, I don't know.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
This is nothing to do with Linus' desire to be a mouthy arsehole, we all know when you whip your workers, and put them under threat of whipping, that they write better and more accurate code (the mouthy arsehole bit comes free).
Stress also helps people code better, and bugs are not an unavoidable fact of programming, they are in fact caused by not enough stress.
Man up dammit!! Our Alpha-Linus will whip you into shape; you don't need physical Alpha-traits these days either, you just dress people down from the other side of a mailing list, where they're unable to punch you in the face.
As Torvalds and whinging 12-year-old FPS players can attest, anyone can be a true 'Alpha' on the Internet. What-cha--gonna-do, noob?!
And, as I was reminded the other day, one advantage of GUIs over CLI is typos are a lot harder to make (as I sadly reminded myself the other day).
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
The increased resource requirements DO in fact do more with your computer. It means apps get developed in man-weeks or man-months rather than years or decades. It means we have a standard set of libraries shared between apps.
When RAM is under $10/GB, I'd much rather spend a couple of gigabytes on the OS platform to get apps that actually get released in a timely manner, include more features and plain do cool stuff that I want to do than bitch that they use more ram than my router built in 1992.
By programmer efficiency, I meant programmer hrs vs. real world problems solved. As I mentioned earlier, it is a trade-off. If you want an OS written in 2/3 of the resources for the same actual problem set, you will be waiting 2-3x as long for it or more. Or it will get "too hard" and never come out. Ever.
If you want to run wm2 or fluxbox or whatever, go for it. Other people have real world tasks they want to do and are prepared to spend say, 50 bucks on RAM and not have to fuck around wasting their time to do it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm here to tell you that hardware is replaced periodically due to failure and continuation of support contracts anyway. In the real world, many companies simply lease their hardware and upgrade every 3 years. Or depreciate and re-purchase every 3 years. In the real world, it is a tax write off.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Need I say more?
And I'm here to tell you that I don't give a shit about corporate tax games. Money wasted is still wasted.
Kid-proof tablet..
The increased resource requirements DO in fact do more with your computer. It means apps get developed in man-weeks or man-months rather than years or decades. It means we have a standard set of libraries shared between apps.
Not necessarily. If you use less efficient code, structures, memory usages, etc. then no you will not. You'll just do the same thing with more resources, and you may even spend more time building it.
Shared libraries do not necessarily mean extra code/resources at run-time. You may, for instance, use static linker level libraries that simply allow modules to be shared; or you may make additional DLLs that do have run-time requirements. But you have to determine which is the best use for the application usage, not just blindly use one or the other.
When RAM is under $10/GB, I'd much rather spend a couple of gigabytes on the OS platform to get apps that actually get released in a timely manner, include more features and plain do cool stuff that I want to do than bitch that they use more ram than my router built in 1992.
Now you're supposing that adding RAM is (i) a possible, and (ii) feasible. Others have already mentioned cases where the systems (even new systems) are already maxed out. RAM is cheap enough now that I tend to max out the RAM when I get a new computer as well. So no, you cannot necessarily just add more RAM.
And when you start writing data intensive applications, more RAM won't help you as you need every bit of it you can to start with. A database not written to be mindful of the resources it uses will not be very useful to other applications except with very small data sets.
I presently work on a near real-time measurement system. Brand new processor boards (even with Core2 Duos) have a max of 1 or 2 GB or RAM. My software has to be resource friendly. If we start swapping to disk (e.g. SWAP file or SWAP partition), it will cause the system to lose data which is unacceptable to our customers. And yes, I went from near zero code to having a deliverable system in less than 9 months, though some of the interfaces were crude it did its job very well.
I've written file servers in the past, and it's no different. If you're not mindful of resources then things can quickly get out of hand. We didn't expect the customer to transfer 1000 files in a day; but we tested for 10,000; the server was expected to be up for months and early testing determined that some lack of mindfulness of resources would crash the server side at just a few hundred at first. As we fixed things to be more mindful we eventually passed the 10,0000 test without any issues - you couldn't tell the software had 10,000 files transferred as we had a zero-sum of resources used after each transfer. We were a little more lenient on the client-side, but it was just as good in the end.
Point is, you have to look at what the software is doing, and making sure it works correctly for its use case and that it uses the resources properly and efficiently for those use cases.
By programmer efficiency, I meant programmer hrs vs. real world problems solved. As I mentioned earlier, it is a trade-off. If you want an OS written in 2/3 of the resources for the same actual problem set, you will be waiting 2-3x as long for it or more. Or it will get "too hard" and never come out. Ever.
And that's essentially the same thing as what I was calling it. it's something that only comes with experience, and cannot be reduced linearly by adding more programmers. And as I noted, programmers that have better programmer efficiency also have the ability to make software that is more efficient and determine where to make the tradeoffs.
If you want to run wm2 or fluxbox or whatever, go for it. Other people have real world tasks they want to do and are prepared to spend say, 50 bucks on RAM and not have to fuck around wasting their time to do it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Sure. So we come back to usage requirements again.
*Sigh*. I guess I'll just have to post this for the millionth time:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html
If you don't agree with the decisions in that link, please do us all (and yourself a favor), and go use something besides open source kernels. If you can't even be bothered to read (at least!) the executive summary in that link, then please stop posting.
Nathan's blog
I preferred the simplicity of system 7 (or 6) over the faux 3d of windows.
Every thing was really clear.
Anything that moves things back in that direction cannot be bad.
Your niche is not typical.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Your niche is not typical.
And you completely missed the point
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
gosgog:
I'll tell you what HE GOT YOUR FUCKING ATTENTION !! and that's what counts.
I'm SO with you. My 1st "full time" programming job was for embedded systems where throwing "more RAM" at a problem wasn't an option. It was programmed with ASM (including a Custom Macro ASM language for the company's own CPUs).
There is ways to be efficient and there are ways to be lazy and there is some happy medium. My biggest gripe is that too many people rely on:
I didn't use an IDE for almost 20 years of my career (and I'm only using one now because of all the "young" programmers that can't even write a hello world program without one). While I'm no longer doing ASM programming, I still try to do things as efficiently as possible (code reuse, static libraries when possible, etc.)
UPS Sucks