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Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Linux turns 25 this year(!!). To mark the event, IEEE Spectrum has a piece on the history of Linux and why it succeeded where others failed. In an accompanying question and answer with Linus Torvalds, Torvalds explains the combination of youthful chutzpah, openness to other's ideas, and a willingness to unwind technical decisions that he thinks were critical to the OS's development: "I credit the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. [...] The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. [...] I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
Linux kernel development needs people who are capable, period.
And you seem to forget who Linus is married to.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
systemd is a distro decision, not a kernel decision.
I'll admit he is showing signs of developing alzheimer's, (No matter how much I explain, he still thinks "Foxfire" is his operating system) but windows update automatically downloading windows 10 in the background has been repeatedly posted on / and seems to be a pretty common issue:
http://www.cio.com/article/304...
http://winsupersite.com/window...
http://www.howtogeek.com/22855...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
In the late 1970ies and early 1980ies, especially the University of Berkeley in California (UCB) added a lot of valuable tools to UNIX, which on many commercial Unixes were installed in /usr/ucb. They even started to reimplement Unix from scratch and created their own distribution of a UNIX kernel and a userland, called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). AT&T, which acquired Bell Labs, the owner of the original UNIX source code at the time, tried to claim ownership on everything that was added to UNIX with the argument, that all the programs and extensions were derivative works of the UNIX source code.
To avoid a similar disaster, Richard M. Stallman tried to start from scratch, creating a complete UNIX environment which was not tainted by any proprietary code, and also invented a licence that guaranteed that it remained so for all eternity.
Still no stable driver ABI. Genius, you say? Fuck you! The man is an arrogant prick.
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Each GNU knockoff of a UNIX tool had many more features.
Yeah, but they were missing features too, like for example that feature where sedcore dumps when you give it a "long line": GNU sed lacks that feature. Ans so on.
Facetiousness aside, the GNU tools didn't just have more and richer features, they were much, much better implemented and even the core feature set was more solid, more reliable and often substantially faster.
I remember in the 90s having to work on a mishmash of SunOS (was it SunOS or Solwaris then?), IRIX, HP-SUX, AIX, Digital UNIX and maybe one other that time has removed from my memory.
First order of the day was always to install the GNU tools because oh my god the system tools were bad on those platforms. Slow, features ossified from two decades before, arbitrary length limits, terrible error messages. Yuck!
Shit, many of the machines didn't even have a shell with tab-completion installed, and certainly not installed by default. The next thing was then to install a version of vi which didn't stink. Back then I used elvis.
Back then GCC was not a 100% clear winner. In terms of engineering it was a better compiler. Much less frequent coredumps, more solid and so on. Problem was it didn't have a great optimizer then and frequently the otherwise worse system compilers produced substantially faster code. GCC is now top notch.
One thing though, GCC has only just caught up to the late 90s ear HP-UX compiler in that the C++ compiler then would offer a list of "near matches" for when an identifier doesn't exist, something GCC only has in a pre-release version.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
You are quite wrong.
http://time.com/3856066/aol-ve...
2.1 million people in America using dialup as of last May.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure but I'm asking about GNU userland on commercial Unixes not Linux on your 386/486 at home :D.
I can answer that with one word: Consistency. The behavior and feature set of a given GNU binary on an AIX box was the same as behavior and feature set that it exhibited on a SunOS box, which in turn gave you the same behavior and feature set on HPUX, BDS, whatever...
You just didn't get that kind of comfy feeling when hopping between OS types and using each vendor's proprietary implementations of a given binary (by function).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
For simple wifi stuff, wicd is a nice lightweight solution.
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the problems described here as justification for systemd's awful interface naming are all things that should be taken care of by a higher level tool such as network-manager.