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Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk)
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
Someone honest.
Sure, this is great and he can say it
And get away with it
But the rest of us work out in the real world
At real jobs with real bosses
And we cant just say "fuck it and fuck your bullshit, I'm heads down working"
Linus perspires when he codes? Ewwww
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. "
-Thomas A. Edison (Privileged White Dude & Climate Denier...) l
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
No matter what the talking heads say about STEM and giving equal opportunity to all. It take real skill, dedication and talent to be a real innovator. Luck comes later.
Similar to screenwriting. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if you can't get it down on paper, it doesn't make a damned difference.
Get with the times - you have to be disruptive now.
I have held that belief for a long time but now someone with credentials said it out aloud.
It just so happens that all these tech businesses ended up in one place, garner all the investments (funded by Americans from all over via wall street) whenever a new fad hits the fan such as the dot com, E-commerce, mobile etc. When they try to start fads nobody wants, they fall flat ( as many have done) and others are turned into partial success by diverting huge investor money (from all over the world) to those worhtless projects.
Just say what you mean. Linus is old. Innovators are young.
Innovation is "invention without a tangible outcome." Make something real.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/07/08/linus_torvalds_flips_the_bird.jpg
Are you sure he didn't have any in Transmeta ? It and the patents were bought out.
Linux is a re-implementation of innovation that happened in the 1970s.
There is nothing innovative about Linux.
Linus should shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.
Someone never used UNIX in the 80s or 90s.
Probably more like "intolerant of bullshit and buzzwords"
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
And what positive contributions have you made to society, snowflake?
Why don't you take your own advice.
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Another possible interpretation is the nasty suggestion that Linux improperly contains something stolen. Re-read it in that light and see if that interpretation fits. We've been down that road before with SCO vs IBM which is still not dead yet. Started in March 2003, still wheezing and gasping for breath in Feb 2017.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Wait, what? I didn't mean to say that, in fact I disagree with it. You're projecting.
I'm not the biggest Linus fan either, but Linux definitely is more than 1970s unix re-implemented. With cgroups, etc., it's more like 1990s unix. :)
Another, less nasty, is that Linus merely forked/reimplemented something that was already there. From scratch, so not stolen, but not really a new idea. Which has some merit; as I recall Linus said the wrote the original kernel as a fun project. Since then, there's been a whole lot of "have an idea, put in a lot of work to make it work".
However, to the original AC's comment I will point out git.
There is plenty of innovation in Linux. There is also 99 times more perspiration than innovation.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born. It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.
I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Yet he proved that great execution of an existing idea is much more valuable and has a much greater impact (worldwide, long lasting impact) than a beautiful, innovative design.
managers / owners do the least and get, by far, the most. meanwhile, the lowest grunts do the hardest stuff, and get the least
unethical lack of real payment for labor is why we as a society so often fail
I picked it up, turned it upside down, and shook it. That's how I roll. Deal.
Didn't Linus basically write git from scratch?
If you want to split hairs, it isn't strictly new, since we've had SVN and CVS for ages. However, git runs circles around them and it did introduce enough new features to become something unique and useful. Unique and useful enough to become the de facto standard version control system in the world (even Microsoft uses it).
So I'd say he has a rough idea about how to innovate. However, with regard to Linux, Linus is mostly a manager these days. He just makes sure things go by smoothly, and cowboys don't take over the development (if it was for "certain people", we'd have an untested and unstable IPC implementation running on the kernel right now, despite the fact that the kernel has had like 3 different IPC implementations for ages now... for a 1% performance gain).
Beautiful designs are generally bad. They get taken to the extreme; and you get shit like xml.
Linus is pragmatic. Uses "goto" when it works, instead of avoiding it religiously.
If don't have the money to buy a non-free kernel, or you want a kernel that you can modify freely, writing it yourself is the mostly reasonable way to do it.
To summarize, I think you are saying Linux is not innovative because it is like Unix, which was already around.
Here's the thing. Technical comparisons aside, Linux did something that none of the Unixes could do.
Linux was open source. That caused a huge development kick start which would be the envy of the private fiefdoms of proprietary closed Unix.
Linux then became cross platform. That causes Linux to run anywhere that the C compiler could run. Again, the envy of closed platforms.
Those two things combined make Linux suddenly attractive to anyone needing to build a software system on a non-PC platform. Or even on a PC platform where OS licensing is an issue. Applications like: smart phones. GPS navigators. TV set top DVRs. Streaming internet TV boxes. Digital cameras. Smart TVs. In car entertainment systems. Digital signage and billboard display applications. Chromecast type sticks. Amazon Echo type devices. And the list just goes on and on and on.
So, is Linux innovative? I believe so. And where all those proprietary Unixes? In the proprietary tarpit. Even Microsoft is realizing that it can't avoid operating with open source and Linux. BTW, Wine now runs on Windows Subsystem for Linux.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I only make negative contributions to society. Back end infrastructure nobody knows about. Software nobody wants to know about. Everybody hates me when they get to know me.
Duke Nukem-esque developer attitude, still more productive than Steve "if it takes too long then unplug and write it again" Jobs.
between those that do and those that don't, is that some people do and some people don't. It's as true in software as it is in any other walk of life. You can't think your way from A to B. You have to walk there.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
totally obvious to any half-way observant person.
....) than people wandering around talking about be "entrepreneurs" , and "creatives", with this shit-faced superiority that only ignorance and inexperience can produce.. Most (98%+) of end up failing, spectacularly, because they think all the value is in the idea, rather than the implementation of the idea. Reality shows us, 99.999999% of the value is in the implementation of the idea, the idea is nearly worthless.
All innovation is simply a series of very small steps. All "discoveries" or "inventions" are at their root, fairly minor enhancements to existing knowledge or craft.
Sure, sometimes those minor enhancements were not at all obvious to anyone except the exceptional person (or team) who made them, but, once the enhancement is announced, it's completely obvious, to anyone willing to analyse it, how it rests on all the past development.
I challenge anyone to find an example of any discovery, invention or other innovation which does not fall into this rule.
Nothing annoys me more (well, not many things anyway, dirty dishes, unmade beds,
I think this is what Linus would say if he had conferred with me first.
You actually just proved his point, and doubled down on the stupidity of some of those patent trolls:
"This is _sort_ of like that stuff! I invented it!" vs. "It took 5 years and a million man hours to get this actually working". No, not everything today was developed 40 years ago, that's completely absurd and negates the life work of many talented individuals.
Steve Jobs: “REAL ARTISTS SHIP”
But details are hard and require knowing stuff, brah. Not. For. Meeeee...
Seriously though, agree totally, but are all those VCs and angels really so brain dead as to not know this? Or are they, like the finance folks capitalizing on herd movement into the stock markets at the moment, just cashing in on the phenomenon until it implodes? I suspect the only ones who aren't in on the joke are the dimwits who genuinely believe their brilliant calorie/counting-or-messaging/Youtube/mashup-or-whatever phone app is going to change the world, and they aren't going to pay much attention to cranky ol' Linus.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.
nothing new since Minix.
Only thing he technologically accomidayed was Transmeta for the stifled Crusoe processor architecture (the arch that should have been in every Android phone from the get-go), and he gave props to the true Workstation ip-theft American computing architecture DEC Alpha. Other than that, Linus should have been working for Nokia and not an H1B in United States.
Good for him, I completely empathize. There is far, far too much of this sort of 'talk' that never amounts jack but for the loudmouths in the industry pocketing ridiculous numbers of dollars. Bravo!
If we look at what's usually called "innovation", it's often really about market acceptance. The first iPhone didn't involve any technology that was unique or special by itself; it was just a combo of features and decent implementation that caught on with the public: knowing what to keep, what to cut, and how to package it all together.
There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around, such as my pet, dynamic relational, but until somebody implements a version that actually catches on with the industry, it won't go anywhere.
Building a practical version would indeed take a lot of Torvalds-style sweat. There are probably roughly a hundred times more interesting ideas than there are good implementors. A Torvalds-like grinder deciding to work on dynamic-relational has a slim chance.
By "interesting", I mean something that has a curious angle or variation that may seem odd or even impractical up-front, but worth exploring in order to kick the tires and tune. It often takes more than one try to get it right. A lot of now-common ideas had early versions that didn't do enough correctly to catch on in the market, sometimes because the hardware hadn't quite caught up.
The Apple Newton is one example; as is arguably the Xerox Star, the first GUI computer; and even RDBMS took more than a decade to take off, despite early promising experiments.
By some accounts, the early relational languages were too "mathy", and Dr. Codd was not good at communicating the benefits to non-academia. SQL made it more approachable. I won't claim SQL is the ideal, by far, but was good enough to catch on in IT shops, being more like COBOL than like math. Several different relational languages and experimental RDBMS were created to explore relational query languages and implementations. This gave the market and entrepreneurs enough sub-ideas to pick and choose from to make something sell-able.
It wasn't a straight line.
Table-ized A.I.
1% mission plan.
99% H1B.
You must be confusing it with NetBSD.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It's so true. The people in SV that actually do the work are the ones that control the things they make or design. The rest is hot air and people showing up for free lunch.
I wandered into some echo-box on Twitter where a bunch of old farts were being roused into a rabble by some liberal journalist talking about how we need basic / universal income now because soon the robots will take away our jobs and life will be pristine, prosperous, and without war.
I called the journalist out on talking a lot of shit, in response to which he just talked more shit. To quote: "the machines will pay us". I had to point out a few things:
1. Technology is a tool, not a participant.
2. If your big solution involves convincing everyone it will work before it exists, using odd language, it probably won't work.
3. If your method of convincing others your idea is sound is to ask them how it's supposed to work in lieu of rebuttle against criticism, it probably isn't sound.
But then his slew of fogies piped up. "What does not make sense is the current system. Real value supports life. Principle of doing no harm= Equality." "lol, it is simple math, do it yourself." And, "citizens income. We will have to get used to more leisure, half jobs, no war just war movies".
No real substance, just pie in the sky rhetoric.
If I hadn't been blocked by the journalist I would go back there and paste this article. Torvalds is right, talking a bunch of shit doesn't get anything done in engineering, or anything else that is and/or that verges on technical including government.
(Unless, of course, you're a liberal arts major.)
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It's round! It rolls! You could use it to transport things! I think I'll call it...the wheel.
Example: I just saw a presentation involving a new ORM framework today - same old idea, same crappy ORM efficiency, why am I supposed to be impressed? How many ORM frameworks do we need? They all do the same damned thing, and all of them do it badly. By the time you have the latest and greatest innovative framework working in your project (having had to mangle to your architecture to compensate for the horrible inefficiency), you could have achieved the same end - cleaner, faster, and with less code - by doing without the framework.
Pick your topic: development methodologies, programming languages, frameworks, whatever: The whole IT branch seems to have institutional amnesia. Each new generation of programmers (i.e., every 5-10 years) rediscovers it all, plasters on new buzzwords, and pats themselves on the back for their cleverness. /rant
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Being "developed on paper" is just another way of saying it wasn't developed at all. I could say I have a time machine developed on paper, doesn't mean I've actually developed a time machine.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
More trite bits of ancient wisdom but change the words and idiots think he's a philosopher. Yes Linus marketing hype is bullshit, now get back to your keyboard.
You're conveniently ignoring the 1970s when Research Unix was open source. You're conveniently ignoring the 1980s when BSD Unix was open source.
Unix was the first cross platform OS. Provided the source code and a C compiler, you could port Unix to any platform you wished.
Are you even aware, time existed before the 1990s?
You're the fucking idiot who thinks C has existed forever because it was invented before you were born and the 1970s were time immemorial. An operating system **kernel** written in a high level language, that was innovative. Writing a new kernel because the old kernels weren't free? That's a mindless engineering exercise, perfect for a moron like Torvalds.
You still butt hurt that Dick "Toe Cheese" Stallman's innovative HURD kernel was an abysmal failure?
Or maybe because Linus rejected your innovative patches because of shit coding?
Linus Torvalds, the Frank Zappa of programmers.
I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Old does not imply outdated.
We still drive cars with steering wheels, because it's a bloody good design.
What many young whippersnappers tend to forget is that when something has survived for decades, there are likely good reasons for it. Unless you understand those reasons, resist the temptation to change things, and instead launch an alternative and let competing products fight based on merit and not edicts.
Minix was a better design. .
I don't know whether to moderate this -1 flamebait or +1 funny. Let's just go with "+0, Ok?"
This industry is full of bullshit and fads.
Innovation, invention and discovery are certainly important and can allow us to more easily or efficiently address needs, but when we are talking about "innovation" or innovative people most of the time what we are really talking about is creative problem solving using already existing methods, knowledge and technology.
It is easy to look at IT and see how real innovations have contributed to a transformation of many aspects of society over the last half century and then fall into the cult of innovation as a sort of belief in perpetual innovation as a means for the betterment of society. But both a longer view and more critical view of our day to day society should confirm the importance of understanding that you already have many of the technological tools and methods needed to address today's needs. And a good application of those already known technological tools and methods should be the priority of problem solving rather than innovation merely for the sake of innovation.
Surely there is always a need for innovation, especially in medicine where virus are constantly evolving to maximize their contagion and our existing tools need to be adapted to new challenges. But in other technology areas the problem domain does not change as remarkably over time. And already developed technology is well suited for most day to day challenges.
Sure you can probably cite a thousand different examples where today's technology is inadequate to a problem or need, but I think the point is that it is no less noble or worthy to address the tens of thousands of those other problems and human needs that can be worked on without the need for any fundamental innovation.
That causes Linux to run anywhere that the C compiler could run.
You must be confusing it with NetBSD.
Sorry Linux now runs on more *real* hardware than NetBSD. And again sorry to say... NetBSD is nearly a dead platform. I liked it when i used it... but it is an exotic toy.
why do you think the syntax is seerial tube aka colon(semi) and it began with mathematics and print or wrute statements.
Or are you confusing language with (.h)header files with (.o)object files and libraries with a manual debugger and compiler and libraries of an appendix?
C existed in mechanical form first, write under your nose. Like Pascal and Fortran, just someone else's point of view on Time in Motion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What else would you expect somebody whose only claim to fame is to build a knockoff of proper UNIXes to say? LOL
How about +1i
What Linus is trying to say is, let use systemd for everything
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.
Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.
Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.
See also: git
The problem is not innovation itself, but more what we're defining as innovation.
When a person can act like a complete fucking idiot on YouTube and amass a billion look-at-this-dumbass clicks resulting in a six-figure salary, I'd say that says a lot about what is "innovative" today. Don't even get me started on reality TV.
The scary part is watching Wall Street get high as a kite off the innovation fumes as they drool over shit like Snapchat, who loses hundreds of millions every year and arrogantly brags how they may never become profitable, defying all common sense with a multi-billion dollar IPO valuation.
Not that we have any.bomb evidence of what happens when bullshit infects innovation...
Agreed, Mr. T.: I say it all the time on /. home of BLOWHARD bullshitters galore! E.G. Khyber https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10245269&cid=53880349/
* He's MORE than WELCOME to backup his blowhard bullshit (but he NEVER ever does & spouts MORE horseshit than anyone else on this forums, no joke...).
World's FULL of "Chattering dolt" types that are "ne'er-do-well" gasbag blowhards. Any FOOL can talk.
APK
P.S.=> There are LOADS of "talk, talk, talk" bullshitters out there but VERY FEW doers (but YOU'RE 1 of them & so am I via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ & most here? Are NOT & massive talkers (nothing more))... apk
Just say what you mean. Linus is old. Innovators are young.
If Innvoator = Patent Troll, then I completely agree with you.
I don't remember typing that. So I guess I hate myself too.
You neglected to quote the whole phrase "developed on paper or implemented in some form"
But you made your point by cherry picking what was said, so you're all good right?
Sadly I've noticed, at least in computers, that the first design is often the best. Until too many people want to jump in and change something for change's sake. Or maybe the first design that gets popularized after the main bugs have been worked out.
Examples of this in the car world is a tiller for steering (replaced by wheel) and electric push button transmission. Or candlestick phones.
It's all about the incentives. That's why so many people like to talk about innovation:
1). For innovation, even if it is only the appearance of innovation, or a new and more convenient packaging of something existing, you can charge more. There is a price premium on new products or anything that looks exciting or with some better value-added;
2). Some highly productive new technology areas are known as innovators. Thus "innovation" itself has become like a meta-brand. It's seen like a holy grail of business, you can't be against innovation, innovation is the best!
3). Innovation has a low bar of entry. It didn't always used to be this way but now it is. Nearly anyone can hang out a shingle, call themselves an "entrepreneur" and an "innovator", and raise buckets of money. Some people of little talent and excessive ambition have noticed this and try to become important this way. All you have to do is have a polished patter, make lots of references to "elevator pitches", "disruptive innovation", and "burn rates" and you can sound like a VC genius. Real geniuses are rare, BS is common;
4). For all that, when real innovation happens, it's magic. New companies, new markets, value is created, and earned fortunes are possible. Lives can be changed.
Are there unique innovations anyway, except for the delight of lawyers? Everything is built on something. The need to state uniqueness and innovation is kind of selfish.
Progress is about sharing, so that the flowers can bloom. Everything else is more or less about constraining innovation.
I watched the development of micro computers in the 1970's. Try re-reading BYTE (and other) magazines of the era. The technology was shockingly primitive. No standardization. The first standardization was around hardware, the 8080 and the S-100 bus. Still no significant software standardization because every system had some cobbled together custom keyboard / display or printer setup. Find a used keyboard from a liquidator, figure out it's circuit board layout, write your own custom interface software, etc. It wasn't until 1977 that the holy trinity arrived (TRS-80, Apple II and Commodore Pet). The first standard off-the-shelf computers. This was where you started to see some commercial software take hold. Just watch the ads in the magazines.
Now to the point.
I am ignoring Unix until a time when it was practical for most people to actually run it. The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC. By the mid to late 90's some people were noticing that you could run Linux on a souped up PC for ten grand and replace a thirty grand Unix box.
If Linux hadn't come along, Unix would be something in obscurity.
Here we are today where you can get Linux on a Raspberry Pi for $35 with 1 GB of ram, gigabytes of SD card storage, 4 core processor, etc. And proprietary unix is relatively obscure.
That makes Linux sure seem innovative to me. It obviously did something VERY right. So much that now Microsoft can no longer ignore it.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It doesn't come from "innovators." It comes from devs who have a particular itch to scratch. What is innovative about Linux is the development model, allowing it to pool a ton of little tweaks.
But if you don't change how it looks, nobody will notice or care that you fixed lots of issues, it works better, has more options etc.
So Linus says "everyone is stupid but me" because "they should all stop self-aggrandizing".
Um... maybe he should take his own advice and stfu about how much better he is than other tech people?
Beautiful designs are generally bad. They get taken to the extreme; and you get shit like xml.
XML was pretty awesome ... as a markup language for books and other natural language documents. It was a wonderful tamed version of SGML. Then some crazy people started using it blindly as a object serialization language.
The odd thing is, you can write terse XML for object serialization (just slightly more verbose than CSV!) but no one did. Instead you got the most verbose approach to serialization imaginable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
>> "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details."
>> Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
this is because Linux took 99% of its innovation from others and then had the 1% kernel.
comment directly in my journal
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
He didn't do that. He paid others to do it for him. Any patents his employees came up with he took sole credit for. Edison was the first tech industry MBA.
I love this man.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I don't think Martian was disagreeing with Linus. All the "innovation" happened in the 50s-70s. It's mostly been perspiration since then.
That's not 100% true of course. The notion of Ajax was legitimately new. Normal HTML GET and POST style web pages were almost identical to the way mainframe terminal systems had worked for decades before, but the terminal asynchronously communicating with the host? Actual innovation that enabled a lot of good (and bad) stuff.
But it's hard to find examples like that. Most of the ideas in the field that keep becoming "new" products every generation were published papers in the 50s-60s, and products in the 60s-70s.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There is plenty of innovation in Linux.
As a design philosophy/architecture or in implementation? A Plan 9 level innovation or a copy pcb structure on a fork innovation? Dreaming up with a better way of doing something is one type of innovation, doing something completely different is another.
There has not been nothing new in operating systems since 1955.
That was twenty years ago.I don't know what has changed since then, but I haven't seen any
"Younger people are just smarter"
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It takes 5 years and a million man hours to get to something to the state of being marketable, but not so much to demonstrate it's viability. Linux didn't go anywhere for years because 'it lacked the polish of windows' but was still perfectly functional and used in mission critical environments.
The key word being now?
Tell that to the DE devs that want to retire X11 basically because its old.
JWZ summed it up as CADT, and it is rampant in DE circles. And it is eating its way towards the kernel.
The day Torvalds steps down, is the day Linux goes belly up.
Unix in the 80s lost not just because it was proprietary, closed off and only ran on very expensive hardware but because it was freakin terrible for everyday users as compared to DOS. The commands were more hieroglyphic, there was no attempt at all at a passable windowing environment until much much too late and it wasn't particularly more stable than DOS too. There were attempts at "cheap" Unix in the 80's. None of them worked. You can find old 80s episodes of the Computer Chronicles on the Youtube discussing all this.
I do not recognize some of the companies in your post. What are those things called TRS-80, Commodore Pet and Microsoft?
#DeleteFacebook
XML was conceived and pitched from the getgo as a Swiss Army knife-type tool that could be a near-universal application-level network protocol and file format substrate. They were wrong.
"Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb."
That is not a characteristic of having Asperger's, it's called determination.
I will answer it this way. What file system are you using? How many other file systems have you used in the past 20 years on Linux? That is one small bit of the Operating System known as Linux, which has nothing to do with what Unix was doing 35 years ago.
Because Unix/Linux has been highly modularized, the innovation you fail to see is happening in all sorts of places. Usually followed by 99% perspiration in getting implementation working. And it appears and small increments in a huge ecosystem.
Heck, I would even suggest to you that Linus Choosing GPL was "innovation" (even the GPL was innovative)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Its called middle managers. They busy them selves by going to meetings they dont need to be in, and getting involved in everything because they dont actually have anything to do.
I think you're going to find that mixing up client-server models has been around for decades. Yes, specific applications like AJAX didn't exist, but most certainly the underlying concepts have been around and used in various systems for a very long time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The big change in many cases has simply been that consumer and enterprise-grade PCs are now capable of the kind of processing that was only available to mainframes up until the last ten to fifteen years. Another responder to my thread tried to reject my statement by saying *he* didn't have access to such technologies, which seems a rather absurd standard. The fact is that IBM was working with virtualization and parallel computing in the late 1960s, and IBM, MIT and other R&D organizations spent the first decades of the computing era developing all sorts of technologies and techniques, but the cost of hardware in those days meant only very large government, academic and corporate organizations could actually afford them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC.
I was running 386BSD on x86 PCs in 1992-93. While all UNIX wasn't proprietary at that point, this was a time of great changes in that realm. ATT UNIX was in the process of getting re-written as BSD. There was also much legal wrangling going on around the re-write, slowing down the process. According to Linus, "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
file:
386BSD initial release: March 12, 1992 Linux initial release: September 17, 1991 Unless you're suggesting Linux wasn't bootable for about half a year after it was released, your claim is false.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
"...Smarter than a lab rat", maybe
I'm struggling to think of an earlier example of the client working async to improve the sync user experience of a UI. I'm pretty sure it was never a standard methodology used across many domains. Ajax was the first time the idea was "productized" AFAIK.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit. I was there during the '90s too. SunOS was the cool kids' UNIX at the time and you could get retired 3/xx series Sun hardware cheap. Linux did run on a common PC but was a bug-ridden, totally insecure crock of shit until about 2.0.
It's a pity that that drooling moron McNealy and his successors fucked up Sun so badly; if he hadn't, Linux would probably a forgotten footnote in UNIX history.
We have the best healthcare, just not for you.
It's a fine line between determination and stubbornness..
XML was conceived and pitched from the getgo as a Swiss Army knife-type tool that could be a near-universal application-level network protocol and file format substrate. They were wrong.
Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact it's good for natural language mark-up. IIRC, all the examples in the standard are of that sort of thing, e.g. using custom-defined &entities; for copyright date. And I recall an interview with one of the creators, who was taken aback at the prevalence of XML for object serialization.
So, "pitched", sure lots of people were pitching XML for all sorts of things. But "conceived"? I'm not sure of that. We'd need to ask Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When is Linux "Done"?
Cause it's not done yet in my view (I'm looking at you real-time, video and audio quirks... even SDCard issues with VFat).
Tech promotion is dependent on getting the work done. The promotion provides the initial funds to pay those salaries... free is not free (as in beer!)--maybe for Linus, but not the rest of us.
Could have, would have, should have, didn't. Besides it's naive to think 386BSD would ever have taken off the way Linux did if only yadda, yadda.
The thing is that the BSD's while still being "free" and "open", Linus was way more open and approachable than the BSD's ever have been, and that's the whole difference. He and Linux benefited from the full power of the network effect, which it is very, very doubtful the *BSDs would ever have, even in the best of circumstances. Linus has always been the epicentre of Linux where all improvements go, and are found by everyone else. *BSD has never, even after the legal cloud went away, managed anything but divide itself, because it's at it's core excluding, not including.
FYI for another 35$ you can run Windows 10.
How is AJAX simply not a form of RPC?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everything is "bytes on a wire"; not much use in saying so. It's the way the RPC calls were used.
The cool idea was that in a UI focused on sync user interaction, the client would work async to make that better. Terminals never did that (and HTML forms are very similar to mainframe/terminal interaction). Doing so required the client to be usefully do sync and async operations in parallel, and that just wasn't very practical until clients had some real computing power. And even then no one thought of it for a few years, it seems.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Translation: they wanted JSON, but it hadn't been invented yet. Since they needed to "get the work done" so they went with what they had.
How is asynchronous RPC in CORBA and its implementations not an example of this? For goodness sake, even most IPC systems have asynchronous modes. If there's anything that novel about AJAX, it's JSON, but that's little more than XML "on the wire". The only thing AJAX is is "asynchronous web form communications on a browser", and there were pre-AJAX techniques like IFORMS and persistent HTTP connections.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Linus doesn't have the talent to invent a new OS. No surprise that he disparages the idea of innovation altogether.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's not the implementation that's interesting, but the use case. You keep ignoring that for some reason. Innovation is solving problems no one had solved before, the techniques used are a different story.
Otherwise, the only innovation in the field was "the Turing machine" and "the quantum computer". Everything else is just implementations of those.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Linus is now officially my hero.
captcha: amenable
But is there anything new in terms of the technology other than smaller and consequently faster and less expensive?. Just because it's new to consumers doesn't necessarily mean it's new to the world of computers. Some of us professionals have spent more time with MIT and other R&D organization than we have in the consumer marketing speak space.
Mmmm... Ajax is a pretty standard client request to a server for information. The "innovation" is cramming it into the framework of javascript and a web browser.
I finished my CS degree a long time before Ajax existed and we certainly did a lot of asynchronous communication with other computers. Except we used sockets and threads and everything was pretty obvious.
A classic case of an RPC system is a DDE link, where a wordprocessor document has a link to a spreadsheet via DDE or OLE link (the latter being a CORBA implementation). An asynchronous DDE or OLE link means you can keep working on the document, and possibly, depending on your implementation, even on the linked spreadsheet cells, without waiting for the spreadsheet to update. AJAX is simply just a form of asynchronous RPC. It's not new, and by god, it's fucking awful to use unless you're using an abstraction layer like a javascript framework. And really, the idea of asynchronous IPC goes back decades, classic examples being database forms that can continue to receive user input even while waiting for communications with the database. The idea that you might want to do some client-side processing or that a client-side process, including a deata entry form, can continue to "work" (whatever that work might be) predates AJAX by decades.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The fuck is this funny?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Yeah and with systemd it's finally starting to feel like 2000s windows.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I'm really hard pressed to think of any major new theoretical computational breakthroughs in the last few decades. Material development, allowing the packing of more and more logic into chips certainly has kept pace, but the underlying logical structures themselves are, so far as I can tell, well-rooted in the computer science developments from the WWII era until the late 1960s. A lot of what seems new, even if it wasn't implemented on production machines, was at least partially implemented in various prototypes. IBM, HP, Xerox, Honeywell and the likely have warehouses filled with test machines that worked on concepts ranging from massive parallelism to virtualization.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As a followup, I think quantum computing probably is one area of ongoing research that is far more recent than work on digital computer theory, so that is a field that isn't really deeply rooted in traditional computer science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NetBSD is nearly a dead platform.
Is it? I switched from FreeBSD to NetBSD in late 2013, there have been some 27k commits on trunk alone since (~1500 in 2017 so far). Also some 30k mails on the mailing lists. Not to say the project couldn't use some funding, but it sure does not seem 'nearly dead'.
when i used it
When did you use it?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC.
Microsoft had a version of Unix (Xenix) in the 80s that could run on x86 boxes.
The word innovation has been overused to the point where it no longer has any meaing whatsoever.
Most of the industry is cyclical and evolutionary rather than revolutionary or disruptive.
I'm getting up there in years and witnessed lots of IT fads. The average seems to be that only 1 out of 10 such fads has significant staying power: it becomes mainstream and common.
3 out of 10 find narrow niches where they do fairly well, and 6 out of 10 pretty much die, often because they were no good or too similar to something already around.
Table-ized A.I.
I, err, imagine it is.
Linus is a douche. Next question.
As much as I like technology, Linus is right. It is self-serving.. Instead of helping you: Our daily life gets harder as time passes on, with to much more information demanded from you, more means to monitor you at work, and a ton of mail to process when you get home.
Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. Sound familiar? :-) I had an idea for computer systems that could adapt to their environments without programming (the 1% part). After 5+ years of hard work and experimentation, I had it into production! Even got a US Patent for it. So, I think the 1% vs 99% stuff is pretty correct. :-) BTW, if you have a device with a chip in it, disc drive, or flat panel display, that software probably built it! I agree with Linus in that innovation doesn't come at the push of a button. First you need to understand your domain, and then you may be able to start seeing around the corners.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I understand privacy. That decision was good. I hope the court does not set a precedent to personal filming in public.
You can run a company without illegally parking in a handicapped space and buying a new car every week so you don't need to get a real license plate tied to your name. Yes, Steve was a jerk above and beyond running the company. When you're constantly screwing over other people, you tend to get further in life. And if you do something interesting, people will defend you no matter what.
http://softwareengineeringmca....
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success?
And don't forget other jerks spreading misinformation when they don't get along. I have seen people ganging up against one guy to bring him down despite he being super talented and done nothing wrong.
In my experience it is the third design that is the best. After the first design you learn what it is you're really trying to solve, after the second design you learn the best way to solve it. The third one is the good one.
"But if you don't change how it looks, *no simple minded people* will notice or care that you fixed lots of issues, it works better, has more options etc."
FTFY
Is it possible that Linux is being jealous or envious of the attention on all the exciting hot new technologies of AI, machine learning, robots, drones, self driving cars and what not while he is stuck with the dusty rusty old world of beaten-to-death problems in OS design and development?
I mean all the bright kids these days want to work in AI and deep learning. Working on OS design would be a death wish for young hotshot researchers and developers.
How about an article on innovative billing practices? Yes, I'm a CenturyLink customer.
Unix was not aimed at everyday dos users. My memories of the 80s are very different from yours. Every proprietary implementation I used was far more stable (and more enterprise) than dos.
You don't get famous, and only very rarely rich, for perfecting existing technology. You become just one in a long line of engineers making incremental improvements.
Everybody knows the Wright brothers invented the airplane (or those other guys, if you're across the pond), but who made the first airplane that could actually reliably serve military or civilian applications? The stall-proof wing? Unless you're a aviation history enthusiast I doubt you have any idea.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Steve Jobs was the first one I thought of when I saw Torvald's quote. People basically worship him for having some simple ideas (or I guess more likely picking the best of other people's ideas).
You are talking about technical matters. The superiority of Sun's OS vs early Linux. I am talking about what ACTUALLY made Linux succeed. Yes, Linux did succeed. It's a real fact. Something made that happen. You don't seem to understand what it was. Nothing McNealy could have done with Sun's OS would have stopped the dominance of Linux. Nothing. Because technical improvements to Sun's OS completely misses the point. Just as you are missing it.
I would point out that the first automobiles were horrible compared to the horse and buggy. Automobiles were unreliable. Difficult to start. You could even break your arm crank starting one if it backfired while you were cranking. They were noisy. Smelly. And worst of all, they frightened the horses.
What you miss when talking about early Linux being crap is that it improved. And improved. And kept improving. But something that you seem to miss set it apart from Sun's OS and made it become dominant. What do you think that thing was?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Okay, so why did Linux come to dominate everything from wrist watches to super computers? Anything that is NOT a desktop / laptop PC. Thermostats. Security Cameras. And I gave a longer list of other items earlier.
What happened to Microsoft's Unix? What prevented it from being what Linux is today? The clue is so obvious, as I pointed out in another reply just now.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Political correctness flows from ideology. Various interest groups will push their version of history and truth forward to service their own agenda. If you have enough critical mass in society, then your voice is heard. Agendas are arbitrary. Some you may agree with, some you reject (examples, vaxxers, anti-vaxxers, make america geat again, BLM, affirmative action to get women and minorities into tech, there are so many).
There are some very politically incorrect truths that no amount of political spin is going to change. My favourite is how to get women into technology positions. There are underlying reasons why --- by and large --- tech companies are heavily loaded with men, european and asian men. Those groups have an interest and some talent in math. Over here at Slashdot, we are full of people who love math. In the rest of the world, people are viscerally afraid of math. They will do anything to avoid doing it, they dont' like it, they don't want to have to do it, they don't understand it, and they are desperately afraid that someone will come along and expose their dirty little secret: they are REALLY bad at math, or worse, they are numerically dyslexic. I know several people, including a lawyer and an english professor, who have admitted that they not only can't do math, (just basic arithmetic, on their fingers), but basically, they have a pathological explanation: their brains are not wired for numbers. Ouch. Numbers move around on the page for them. There's no program, course, or teacher who could move them into numeracy.
So now lets get down and dirty. Computer programmers are, even the "talented" and competent ones, by and large, rule followers. Most people in our industry that I have worked closely with DO NOT attempt to analyze problems from first priciples but instead immediately look for examples and design patterns. A shift towards design pattern, imho, has been good for the industry as a whole. Why reinvent the wheel, etc. Most programmers I have worked with think in terms of the tools they were taught. In our case, the tools are: language x,y,z and design patterns.
I can't tell you the number of times my staff came to me and said that the thing I wanted them to do was technically impossible. In software development, you are confronted with "technically impossible" frequently. In most cases, after more research, theorizing, and testing those theories ( in code) these "technically impossible" problems were surmountable.
Bottom lines: creativity is rare. people are scared to go down roads that they can't see the end of, hence the extreme dependence on design patterns-- you know what a design pattern is for. Innovation is a rare convergence of multiple factors. Could it be taught? Not really. Yes, and no.
Look at the various flavours of software design and implementation that have been inflicted on us. There are many titles, software designers, architects, developers, programmers, sw engineers. There are many methodologies. But the bottom line persists: software development hasn't changed that much over 30 years. The same problems are constantly coming up, and the use of design patterns hasn't changed that. There has been a rush to get non-math people to learn programming. What you get is people who know 1 thing, 1 tool, then they turn around and try to solve all problems using those things. To a man with a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Agile tried to incorporate the realities of running a software dev project into the methods, but many people don't really feel it, and then they try to work around the methodology. In the end Agile doesn't improve quality, time to market, or... anything.
You can't teach innovation to rule followers. You can't make (good) programmers out of people who don't have aptitude for algebra. 20 years from now the makeup of the tech workplace will be at most incrementally different than today.
Note: the best designers that I have come across (in the software development world) are architects. Real architects, the ones who design buildings. Why? Because they can think in abstract terms, they are not restrained by thinking in terms of tools.
Could be a scumbag
the coding is still going to be fun for me as long as I'm solving problems and just typing lines of code, and sitting with an upstraight back
*percent
it's 99% "project management" (as well as something called "process management"), 1% work.
At least that's how the suits see it.
You completely missed my point. "Developed on paper" is NOT in the same class as "implemented in some form", it's just a false equivalency and should be called out as such.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It was possible to do asynchronous communications via get and post using hidden frames. No xmlhttprequest needed. There really isn't much new under the sun :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Too bad many of these "jerks and asses" were just really good at ripping off other peoples' ideas and burying the evidence. They were more salesmen than innovators.
oh get REAL.
Git has a poor user interface and is badly documented, in my opinion.
See my subject: WEAK! I don't always agree w/ Mr. T. either, e.g. his thoughts on Pascal & my response https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10204455&cid=53806455/ DUMB to use C in kernels (makes everyone dumb) & yes, you can determine null term'd strlength via sending 2 pointers thru a string, 1 double the size of the other. When the larger errs out you have a midpoint. Double it, you have length (IsOdd/IsEven test required, on odd subtract 1). It's some work & work you do NOT have to do using Pascal (has string length built into strings which is WHY it doubles C++ in strings (& math too)).
His error on labels in Pascal is WRONG too (but we do agree GoTo is OK if you go 1 direction, down & out, for any labels calling it to a SINGLE exit label out of a proc/function)
APK
P.S.=> Pitiful dolts wasting your time & lives 'chattering' on /. when you could be improving the world's lot as I do (Mr. T. too) - but then again, YOU have to have skills to do it - you clearly DON'T (it's YOUR fault for being wastes of LIFE)... apk
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
This comment is rated 5, Insightful. HA. Only on the new /. I guess...
Steve Jobs is a talentless douche. Great marketer, no question, but a talentless douche. His only REAL donation to the modern desktop is his pushing for good fonts back in the classic mac days. Oh, and "curvy" rainbow coloured boxes instead of the beige dried-vomit of the time.
The Woz, the wizard of the pair, is on record (his own site) saying Jobs was never a dev. For giggles ask how many people that think Jobs was a genius if he was also a dev, In my experience it's near 100%.
And the bringing back Apple for the dead? Not without a donation of millions directly from Bill Gates himself. Forgot that didn't you. And it's wasn't Apple /computers/ that saved Apple, it was iTunes. Apple computers and hardware is, even according to Woz himself, no long innovative.
Before ajax at my company we used a simple xml tag for the same purpose. Ajax is just a library.
There's also another aspect: Linux ran on cheap (and nasty) hardware that people actually had available. The BSD people were famous for "That's a crap piece of hardware; wont write a driver for that. Buy this expensive kit instead..." Linux OTOH was driven by a "lets make it run everywhere" kind of ethos.
My first 386 ran Linux from version 0.11 and onwards. I couldn't even get the (semi legally aquired) 386 BSD versions to boot. Let alone run.
Stefan Axelsson
Bullshit. I was there during the '90s too. SunOS was the cool kids' UNIX at the time and you could get retired 3/xx series Sun hardware cheap. Linux did run on a common PC but was a bug-ridden, totally insecure crock of shit until about 2.0.
Well I was there too, and my recollection is a bit different. First you couldn't get "cheap" 3/xx hardware unless you were lucky or connected, and second Linux may not have been performant early on, but it wasn't especially buggy or "insecure crock of shit", well at least not compared to anything else. SunOS came with a boat load of severe vulnerabilities right out of the box for basically the whole of the nineties. And it was neither worse nor better than anything else. Security just wasn't understood or on everybody's radar until it started to pick up the very last years of the nineties.
Stefan Axelsson